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Spare drive letters with Thinstall Applications which rely on hard-coded drive letters
May 9, 2008
A nice and unique feature of Thinstall is that you can mount the same drive letter into more Thinstalled applications. At this way you can spare a lot of drive letters within your network infrastructure. For example it is possible to use drive letter L: for CD-rom one and drive letter L: for CD-rom two. Because the application runs in separated bubbles they cannot conflict each other. In this case you have to remind that the specific drive letter will not be used on the machine for other targets such as drive mappings. A Windows drive mapping is always leading above a thinstalled drive letter.
This technique is called “Virtual Drives”. Virtual drives are visible only to applications running in the virtual environment. They do not have any impact on the real Windows environment. Isolation modes for virtual drives will be inherited from the project’s default isolation mode unless you specific override it. If a virtual drive is setup with IsolationMode=Merged, any writes to that drive will fail if it does not exist on the real system.
Projects created by Setup Capture will automatically list virtual drive information for drives that were present at the time of capture. VirtualDrives is specified as a single string which can hold information for multiple drive letters and optional parameters for those drive letters. The simplest usage is to specify a single virtual Drive letter, by default, it will be assigned a serial number and type of FIXED
[BuildOptions]
VirtualDrives=Drive=L
Topics: VMware | 1 Comment »
May 10th, 2008 at 12:36 am
[...] separated bubbles they cannot conflict each other. In this case you have to remind that the [...] Source One of the key reasons VMware acquired Thinstall was because we saw a gap in the current [...]