[PATCH] [RFC] Make drive C always a "Local disk"

[Scott Ritchie]

Ben Klein wrote:
> 2009/3/8 Scott Ritchie <scott at open-vote.org>:
>> David Gerard wrote:
>>> 2009/3/8 King InuYasha <ngompa13 at gmail.com>:
>>>
>>>> Drive C: is not necessarily the truly central drive. I have seen Windows
>>>> installs that installed on D: and have C: as a permanently mounted network
>>>> share. To assume that drive C: is always what it is... is blasphemy.
>>>> However, Wine does make this assumption, and probably the patch would be
>>>> appropriate. Just throwing that out there. However, I have also seen wine
>>>> installs onto a network where the WINEPREFIX is a network share so that
>>>> multiple people can use the same program.
>>> This is true. I've seen a Windows box at work which has the system on
>>> the E: drive and no C: drive at all. WHAT.
>>>
>>> That said, is there any program in the world that would balk at
>>> installing on C:
>> No, and Vista now defaults to always reassigning the system drive to C:\
>>  - it's not bad for us to copy that behavior.
> 
> ALL versions of Windows *default* to C: being the first (primary)
> harddisk partition detected, and being the partition where the system
> gets installed. Configurations that don't have C: have been
> specifically configured as such, which is still possible with Wine.
> 
> What I'm unsure of, but suspect is so, is that it is impossible, on
> native Windows (XP, Vista, possibly server versions too?), for C: to
> be a network share. I'm sure it's true of Win9x :)
> 
> 

This isn't strictly true with XP and earlier: if you had other drives
(even sometimes card readers and USB sticks) available at install time,
often Windows would install itself onto an E:\ drive.  Some systems
would run into trouble after adding a disk because Windows would
reassign the new disk to C:\ and the old install would move off C:\,
breaking some apps.

On Vista, however, when you add that new disk Windows keeps its system
drive as C:\, even if the new disk is earlier in priority.  You can also
have multiple installs of Windows on a system, and while the XP ones may
be happy to boot from E:\, the Vista ones will also rename it to C:\ for
you once inside.

So, that said, I'm not sure it's possible to have a non C:\ drive as a
system drive on Vista.  If so, it certainly requires more configuring
than XP does, where it would happen on accident.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie