Ubuntu – How to create a secondary hard disk directory for WINE

filesystempartitioningwine

I have a .wine folder in my home directory of my main ubuntu hard disk /dev/sda1

The problem is that I am reaching full capacity and cant install new programs with wine on the wine's C drive (which is in the .wine folder of my /dev/sda1 hard disk)

I have a separate physical hard disk in the same computer /dev/sdc which is almost empty and which I can find under /media/myusername/hdd2

I thought that I simply could just run in the terminal winecfg and then add a hard drive D: to the list and point it to /media/myusername/hdd2/folderforwine/

I could create the D: drive set it as a hard disk and point it to that folder.

But I can not install the new game I want 🙁

Its called path of exile, it has a setup exe which installs a launcher that downloads the game (and from which you play the game)

I can run the setup.exe successfully and set the installation path under D: (which leads to the folder I created in my /dev/sdc secondary hard disk) but when it finishes and the launcher icon appears in my ubuntu desktop then I can not run the launcher (which downloads the game to the D: directory).

There is no compatibility issue at this stage with wine since if I try to install it on c: (which is inside my .wine folder) everything works fine and the launcher runs and downloads the game.

So I think I somehow must edit wine to make it see the folder in my secondary hard drive as a windows hard disk or something like that.. please help! thanks! 🙂

Best Answer

There are multiple options:

  • Create a new Wine prefix on the new drive. You should use a new Wine prefix for each (unrelated) application anyway because different Windows applications tend to have different and changing requirements as to Wine settings and native libraries. PlayOnLinux can help you manage Wine prefixes and application starters if you don't want to do it on the command line and with a text editor.

  • Move the existing Wine prefix to the new drive and either

    • create a symbolic link to the new location at ~/.wine, e. g.,

      ln -vsT /path/to/new/wineprefix-location ~/.wine

    • or update the WINEPREFIX environment variable in all your application starters (or shell scripts) for Wine applications to point to the new location, e. g.

      [Desktop Entry]
...
Exec=env WINEPREFIX="/path/to/new/wineprefix-location" wine [...]
...

  • Move one or more large sub-directories of ~/.wine to the new drive and sym-link them to their old location. You can do this with new directories for new applications and games too.

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