wine users - Dec 2011 - Disk drive question

I am new to Wine--I tried it about 7 or 8 years ago, with no luck 
whatever, and now for the first time I'm
trying it again.  I am amazed at how well it works!  I have installed 2 
windows programs, DraftSight and
GcmWin.  The first is a CAD program and the second produces a Great 
Circle Map centered on your input
coordinates.  I would like to try and install an old AutoCad, but I'm 
having trouble with it, not only in
Wine, but in XP itself.  It depends for installation on a floppy disk 
and a CDrom.  I am using a laptop at
the moment, with a built-in CD drive and an external USB floppy drive.  
What will Wine call these
drives? (I may have to point to one or the other in the course of the 
install, altho I should not have to.)

Thanx for all help--doug

Hi Doug! Wine is a lot better now! Still far from perfect, but boy does it do
some things well.

First, are you in Linux? Because I know with Linux Mint there is an issue
mounting floppy discs, and I wanted to make sure at least the floppy was
mounting in Linux (or whatever the OS may be) before you attempt to mount it in
Wine.

You just open winecfg, go to the Drives tab, and assign drive letters to
directories of your real filesystem where you have things mounted. For example,
if the floppy is mounted at /media/dougs_sober_floppy, you can assign
"A:\" to that directory (path) via winecfg. Of course, only programs
ran through WINE will see any of these "assigned" DOS drive letters.
In fact, they only apply to programs ran (in WINE)  under that particular prefix
(the prefix you were running winecfg under).

I've heard that Wine is supposed to automatically mount detected mounted
discs, but I have not seen this happen personally.

Furthermore, does your program actually check to see if it is being installed
off a floppy/ CD? Because if it were me, I'd be afraid of the floppy giving
out/ getting near a magnet/ something. Do you have an image backup of your CD
and of your floppy?

If it's not checking to see if it's actually on a floppy, you can just
mount the floppy image (using the mount command) and not worry about having to
remember to bring an external floppy reader next time you go install this
software on a computer.

If it actually is checking to see if it is being installed off a CD, CDEmu can
fix that, at least for Linux. CDEmu is free and open source. Unfortunately,
I'm pretty darn sure that a floppy emulator for Linux does not exist,
because, just for fun, those are the kinds of things I look for and I searched
hard for one and couldn't find one, not that I would actually need it. But
there is always the far extreme of installing VirtualBox, mounting the floppy
image into a virtual machine to use its floppy emulator, and then network share
that floppy to your real machine. Well, I know you can network share CD drives,
and I'm merely assuming the same can be done with a floppy.

Hope it goes well for you!

P.S. There is a free floppy emulator for Windows that I have used (and it works
great): http://vfd.sourceforge.net/. Google did not reveal the older site, I
guess they moved to Source Forge. Oh wait. That means they're open source
now. Cool!

Enjoy the holidays!
Jake