Drive Settings Details

Understanding Wine Drives

All Windows programs think of paths as Windows paths. For example, they expect paths such as C:myapp/some.exe. But macOS paths are not written that way; they use Unix/Linux-style paths such as /Users/myID/some.app. Even if the user does not need to care, Wine must provide paths that Windows programs can understand.

C: Drive

Wine maps this path to a macOS path for Windows apps. For example, it maps something like /User/MyID/WinePrefix -> C:/.

Here, C: means the Windows C drive. You can think of the C drive as an alias for the macOS path assigned by Wine. However, the C drive only exposes the contents inside a specific mapped path.

C:/Program Files/
C:/Users/
.
.
.

It cannot access other macOS folders or programs outside that mapped path. In other words, it can only use what is inside the mapped C:/.

Z: Drive

Z: is an alias for the macOS root path, /. If the C drive is for paths inside the mapped prefix, the Z drive can point to paths outside that macOS system location.

Therefore, Z: is useful for running Windows apps located outside the prefix or managing apps shared across prefixes. However, because Z: points to the top-level root path, manually specifying full external paths can be quite cumbersome.

G: Drive

For that reason, BDIH Launcher additionally provides a path called G Drive (G:) that all Bottles can share and that lets users choose the path themselves. It lets users use an arbitrary external path without repeatedly specifying the full path.

G Drive (G:) can be found in the Wine section of settings. Through this G: Drive, multiple Bottles can easily store and share games.

Tip

Set G: Drive to the location where you want to store games, as shown in the image. Then install games, except for the launcher itself, into this space.

Caution

To change the G: path, stop all running Bottles first. Already running Bottles may not recognize the newly assigned G: Drive.