wine users - Jan 2002 - Wine and damage of original MS Windows

Hello,

I want to protect original MS Windows installed on their partition
against wine :)

I have not own experiences with similar problems but I fount next 
message in README:

----
You should backup all your important files that you give Wine access
to, or use a special Wine copy of them, as there have been some cases
of users reporting file corruption. Do NOT run Explorer, for instance,
if you don't have a proper backup, as it renames/cripples several
directories sometimes. Not even other MS apps such as e.g. Messenger are safe,
as they launch Explorer somehow. This particular corruption (!$!$!$!$.pfr)
can at least partially be fixed by using
http://home.nexgo.de/andi.mohr/download/decorrupt_explorer"
----

Do you have any idea how to protect original Windows without backup?
Or is the backup the only solution in this time?


Thanks for hints,

Petr

On Tue, 29 Jan 2002, Petr Mladek wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I want to protect original MS Windows installed on their partition
> against wine :)
>
Good, you looked at the README :-).
...
>
> Do you have any idea how to protect original Windows without backup?
> Or is the backup the only solution in this time?
>
>
> Thanks for hints,
>
> Petr
>
the original Windows partition is of no use or significance to Wine in
itself.  You don't _have_ to let Wine get at it at all.  Various files
in it (registry, maybe some native windows dll's, application programs,
data files, directory structure) might be, but Wine is just as happy to
use copies of all this junk in any directory of the linux filesystem.

The easiest way, if you have the disk space, is to just copy the whole
partition or selected directories to someplace else in the linux vfs and
tell Wine to use that for dirve C:

I use this little script to copy directories when I have occasion to:

#!/bin/bash
tar -C $1 -cOl . | tar -C $2 -xpf -

There is also a scheme described in
<wine>/documentation/installling.sgml to mirror parts of a read-only
windows partition so application programs can write where think they
need to.

Lawson