[Wine] Re: How do you get your CD-Rom Drive to Work

[SpawnHappyJake]

> Is there a way to make windows recognize your CD-Rom Drive on your mac computer??


You meant:

> Is there a way to make Wine recognize your CD-Rom Drive on your mac computer??


...right?

Or did you just totally ask a Windows question on a Wine forum? If so, at least you're closer to topic than those that post about buying their stuff, but a Windows question on the Wine forum is still not acceptable.

First, a couple things. The word "drive" can mean too many things, and I try to avoid it. So I'm assuming that you are not asking how to get Wine to show the actual optical disc reader to programs. For example, if you wanted to find out the hardware name of you actual "reader" (the thing you insert the round flat thing into) by opening up ImgBurn via WINE, Wine has to pass that hardware information to ImgBurn. Sometimes the reader itself is called a "drive". Other times a drive letter is referred to as a drive, such as "the E: drive". I think your situation is that programs ran via Wine aren't seeing a drive letter containing the files and folders on one of the data tracks on your optical disc. There's normally only one data track per optical disc, and thus only one drive letter per optical disc, but there can be more than one.

Know that Mac doesn't use drive letters. Nor does Linux or FreeBSD or most operating systems. Instead, a "drive's" contents, what you would find in a drive letter in Windows, is displayed in a folder at a certain path (directory) with most operating systems. So the drive is mounted to that path instead of to a drive letter. So the entire folder-file hierarchy comes to a single point: "/" , rather than possibly several as in Windows: C:, D:, E:, etc. So something might be mounted at /media/seagate/partition1 . You navigate to that path, and the contents of that "drive" are displayed in there, rather than at a drive letter.
So in Mac, the data track of your optical disc might be mounted at /Volumes/[name of volume on optical disc]. But you want, for example, a Windows game to see that as "drive E:". That's where winecfg comes in. You can open winecfg by typing "winecfg" in terminal and hitting enter. You say to associate /Volumes/[name of volume on optical disc] to "E:". This _will_not_ make a "drive E:" show up in Finder or be recognized by any native Mac OS X applications. It will only be seen by Windows programs ran via Wine. And not nessicarily all programs ran through Wine. Winecfg settings apply to whatever Windows programs you tell them to apply to. You can have separate "Wine Worlds" called "Wine prefixes". You make a folder and say in terminal "WINEPREFIX=[path to folder] wine (program you want to run)". That folder is the Wine prefix and is used as a "drive C:". So you can do "WINEPREFIX=[path to folder] wine winecfg" and set the settings for an individual prefix. Even within a prefix, you can select an individual executable in that prefix and give it settings different from other programs in that prefix.

To get Wine to present a data track of an optical disc as mounted to a drive letter to Windows programs, open winecfg, go to the "Drives" tab, and add (click the "Add" button) the path to where Mac has mounted the data track of your optical disc, and have winecfg associate that path with a drive letter of your choice. Just know that some programs might expect the track to be mounted at the same drive letter as when the program was installed. I believe this is the case with Star Wars Battle for Naboo when it does the CD check. To see where Mac has mounted your data track, go to terminal and enter "mount". That will say where everything has been mounted by Mac.

>From my observations, associating where an optical disc data track is mounted to a drive letter in winecfg does more than present that drive letter to Windows programs in that prefix. It also makes the hardware info of the optical reader (in which is the optical disc containing the data track that is mounted to the drive letter) available to the Windows programs in that prefix.

Also beware that audio discs do not contain files. You can't mount them. There's nothing to show in Finder, or any file browser for that matter. However, different operating systems have different ways of creating a directory (a drive letter in the case of Windows) and showing files in that directory that don't actually exist, but are rather representative of tracks on the disc. But it looks like the audio CD has been mounted to this directory to the layman.

Cheers,
Jake