Installing Wine Using An Existing Windows Partition As Base

Some people intend to use the data of an existing Windows partition with Wine in order to gain some better compatibility or to run already installed programs in a setup as original as possible. Note that many Windows programs assume that they have full write access to all windows directories. This means that you either have to configure the Windows partition mount point for write permission by your Wine user (see Dealing with FAT/VFAT partitions on how to do that), or you'll have to copy over (some parts of) the Windows partition content to a directory of a Unix partition and make sure this directory structure is writable by your user. We HIGHLY DISCOURAGE people from directly using a Windows partition with write access as a base for Wine !! (some programs, notably Explorer, corrupt large parts of the Windows partition in case of an incorrect setup; you've been warned). Not to mention that NTFS write support in Linux is still very experimental and DANGEROUS (in case you're using an NT-based Windows version using the NTFS file system). Thus we advise you to go the Unix directory way.