Using wine with fat32 shared drives (mounting/write problems

Rexx Magnus · 10-11-2008, 01:18 PM

Ok, I dual-boot my system with windows XP (for work purposes) and decided that if I've got games that I like to run in windows, I might as well be able to run them on Linux too. I put them on a shared fat32 partition and tried to mount it.
Initially it didn't work, so I fiddled around with the fstab and finally came up with an entry that enables me to write to the disk and keeps the changes (I had problems with being either unable to write to it, or writing to it and finding the files gone when windows booted).
This setup seems to keep the files, but Wine can't write to the drive when trying to save games (I don't know if it can install stuff either at this point, as I was only able to by trial and error - but again it still wasn't able to save games after installing).

Fstab:

Code:

# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
/dev/sda2       /               ext3    errors=remount-ro 0       1
/dev/sda6       /home           ext3    defaults        0       2
/dev/sda5       none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/hda        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0
/home/testing.iso /mnt/iso		iso9660	user,loop	0	0
/dev/sda7	/media/share 	vfat	rw,auto,exec,users,uid=1000,gid=100,umask=000	0	0

Permissions on /media/share:
(example output from ls -all)
drwxrwxrwx 2 root users 4096 <date> share

Now wine seems able to copy files using winefile and they show up when I do so. I'll boot into windows now and see if the file shows up there too - I've found that oftentimes things appear to have changed but not been written to the drive.

After rebooting, it appears that the files are no longer visible to windows (so the drive hasn't been changed) but going back into Linux the files I've copied there are now visible again. This feels like they're being put in the mount point's structure and stored there, but not being written to the drive (which can account for the inability to save games).

I just realized that I think it's also being mounted elsewhere (other than from the fstab entry) since watching the output during boot, it shows something trying to mount a fat32 drive and mentioning utf8 not being recommended.

edit: I just created the share folder under /home/username/ just to check that it was the folder permissions - they're all fine, and it's still not working so I'm assuming it's definately the entry in the fstab that is mucking things up.

GlennsPref · 10-12-2008, 09:19 PM

Hi, try changing the permissions to user instead of root. for the fat32 partition.

My fat32 line in fstab looks quite simple...
# Entry for /dev/sdb8 :
UUID=4807-901A /mnt/win_d vfat umask=0,iocharset=utf8 0 0

have you checked winehq to see if there are any tips there...

[Wine]Configuring Wine to use on a separate partition
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine...ay/017930.html

see how you go..

regards, Glenn

Rexx Magnus · 10-13-2008, 04:24 AM

I tried using your fstab parameters, but that didn't seem to make any difference either.
I've tried changing the mount point's ownership to the username and users group, but when I check the permissions in the kde file manager, it's still showing as root and users - most odd.

I can copy files onto the drive, but they're still not showing under windows (even though they may reappear in linux) and wine still can't save games.

GlennsPref · 10-13-2008, 04:31 AM

Hi, can you access the drive via ~/.wine/dosdrives/ etc.

I used the scan button and my counterstrike drive came up as n:

But I have my own problems, some sound and version conflicts, I think, alsa is not listed.

But cstrike runs, a bit slower than windows, but I's also sorting out driver-module issues with my graphics card and motherboard.

I can only suggest having a closer search at winehq, and the net.

Rexx Magnus · 10-13-2008, 07:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GlennsPref

Hi, can you access the drive via ~/.wine/dosdrives/ etc.

I used the scan button and my counterstrike drive came up as n:

But I have my own problems, some sound and version conflicts, I think, alsa is not listed.

But cstrike runs, a bit slower than windows, but I's also sorting out driver-module issues with my graphics card and motherboard.

I can only suggest having a closer search at winehq, and the net.

No, I haven't tried looking in that path yet, but will give it a go.

Edit:
I found that the files are indeed showing up under windows, so it must be a permissions issue now. I hadn't rebooted windows and instead had resumed from a hibernate state. Evidently windows doesn't reload FAT data (as it wouldn't, I don't think it would expect the filesystem to have been changed, of course!) and wasn't showing the new files, Doh!