Disclosed is a set of tools or program instructions, an installation program, and a system that operates a drive in a platform independent manner. A drive object represents a single drive mounted by an operating system and contains fields providing information including drive name, block size, free space, type, format long file name support, and space needed by the files to be installed on that drive. During the installation process, each drive is processed to ensure that the drive has sufficient free space for the files to be installed.