I have installed WINE and now have 2 icons on my desktop.
Wheni type winecfg at the terminal I get;

Warning : the specified Window directory L"c:\\windows is not accessible.
Warning : the specified System directory L"c:\\windows\\system 32 is not accessible.

These two lines are then repeated.

The Wine configuration window opens, I accept the default values and download a windows program the c: drive but it will not run.
I suspect I need to fix this Warning message. Can someone give me a clue.
Thanks

This is my guess. Wine can use real Windows system or fake Windows system to work. In your case, I expect, you "choose" the real Windows system and wine does not have enough permission to use real windows system (partition). So the solution is reinstall wine with fake windows system or you give enough permission to wine to access real windows partition.

Thanks Melinda, that is useful.
I have 2 drive icons on the desktop, one from mounting the c:drive before installing WINE and the other which appeared after I installed WINE.
One of these has a "padlock" synbol against it which presumably means it is locked.
If I right click on either of these icons and select properties>permissions it shows that all permissions are "ticked" but are greyed out so I assume not active.
The Text view setting is drwxrwxrwx
and the number view is 1600777
Same in both cases.
Can you suggest how I can activate the permissions?
and perhaps unlock the locked drive?
Thanks
ffilc

have you tried running winecfg again?

If you really want to use real Windows partition with wine then you must find out how to mount Windows partition read/write.

Thanks gruntwerk,
Yes, I have tried running winecfg again and I get the same result including the two warning messages.
Was there something particular you think I should check?

From the Drives tab Autodetect shows;
C: /
D: /media/cdrom0
E: /media/C
H: /home/name
Z: /

If I type; ls -la ~/.wine/dosdevices I get;
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 name name 4096 Date Time .
drwxr-xr-x 4 name name 4096 Date Time ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 name name 1 Date Time C: ->/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 name name 1 Date Time Z: ->/
Which appears to say that I have all read, write and execute permissions, but see my first post.
Any suggestions?

Thanks Melinda, you are correct that is what I want. see the previous post for more detail.
I feel I am missing something which should be obvious.
Help needed

You don't want your wine "drive C" to point to your root directory. Change it to your windows directory (e.g. /mnt/windows) and make sure the windows directory has enough permission for wine. And if your wine issue is resolved please change your root directory permission to default. You don't want your root directory has rwx access for other.

Thank you melinda_sayang another helpful contribution.
If you look at post#8
It was my intention that C: / would take me to the windows root directory and that E: /media/c would give me a directory into which I could download a windows program and run it without interferring with my main windows installation.

If I understand you correctly I should Remove C: / and replace with C: /mnt/windows, can you please confirm?

Additional information;
If I click on any drive in winecfg and select Brouse, I get this message;

err:shell:SHGetFolderPathW Failed to create directory 'L"c:\\windows\\profiles\\name\\Desktop"'.

??? ffilc

/ is not windows root directory. / is root directory. If you don't want windows program not interfere with your main windows installation, why not use fake windows installation? Yes, I confirm you. Point C: to your windows directory not root directory.

My guess you get the error because you don't have enough permission to create the directory.

sorry been busy... when I start wine, my drive c for wine is in ~/.wine/drive_c
not /dev/hdc1 - there are differences between the regular windoze .dlls and the ones used by wine...

anyhow, back to your question....
in my fstab, i have :

/dev/hdc1 /mnt/dosc auto auto,rw,nosuid 0 0
for the c drive for a win98 install, any user can do read/write
this drive is loaded under winecfg as
drive d:

I also have drive g: mounted read/write for a win2k install with the following line in fstab

/dev/hdc3 /mnt/dosg ntfs-3g silent,umask=0002,utf8=true

What is in your fstab?

Thanks Melinda.
OK I removed C: / and used browse to select and add back the C: drive which is in my "media" directory.
It now reads C: /media/C/
The Warning messages have gone (see post #1) so we have some success.

However I cannot run any of the programs on the C: drive.
If I double click on a program icon I get the message;
'Couldn't display "/media/C/program name"'
I can access and read document files OK, so I think the 'permissions' must be OK and I cannot see where I could change them anyway.
Do I have to re-install a program under Wine if i want to run it ??
Thanks Melinda we are making progress and I am sorry I am so slow.
ffilc

Hi gruntwerk, thanks for coming back.
When I first removed the C: / drive I used Autodetect to add back the drive and that gave me;
../drive_c
I changed this on melinda's suggestion (see above), so I now have C: /media/c/ as the first line in my winecfg Drivers.

I checked my fstab as you suggested;
/dev/hda2 / ext3 defaults,errors = remount -ro 0 1
/dev/hda5 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc media/cdrom) udf,iso9660 user, noauto 0 0
/dev/hda1 /media/C vfat defaults,umask = 0000 0 0

I note you have rw permission on the C: drive and since melinda suggests that is the cause of my problem perhaps I should edit that line.
Your fstab is very different to mine!
My objective is to run programs in Linux which I prevously used in windows XP so that I can get away from windows.
ffilc

Hi,

try use ../drive_c as your C: drive and see if it works.

YES, you do need to reinstall windoze programs under wine to run them...