Saturday, October 7, 2017

Why can an application installed using Wine not access NTFS partitions?


Ubuntu was installed alongside Windows 7 on my system. After some days, I deleted and formatted the Windows partition and didn't format the other NTFS partitions.


Before that, I installed Wine on my Ubuntu. I used it to install some software like Picasa. When I tried to open some images on a NTFS partition using Picasa, I was unable to view or access these partitions. I will show my partition details -


Screenshot of GParted


As you see, I have 4 NTFS partitions in total. When I opened Picasa and searched for the partitions in which the images are saved, I was unable to find some partitions (sda5, sda6 and sda7).


Picasa open image dialog


This is the window that was opened by Picasa when I tried to search image files. How can I access the partitions in which the images are stored from Picasa?



Wine, trying to mimic how the drive letter works in Windows, also includes the Z: letter for the root file system on Ubuntu as shown in the Drives option in the winecfg:


enter image description here


Just open winecfg and go to the Drives tab to see which letters are assigned to which folders.


A quick example of how Z: looks if I try to search on it:


enter image description here


As you can see, from here I can navigate to media and find the NTFS partition from there. In your case it would be in /media/tomin/.... You can also add new letters that point to a specific folder, like letter D: if you wanted to point directly to the NTFS partition.


As Takkat mentioned something VERY important in the comments, Wine can not mount a file system (Mounting is a Ubuntu system action, not so much a Wine option). So you need to first mount the file system, via File/Nautilus for example, and then proceed to use the Wine app you need.


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