How do you make a master disk?
Lars Petrus
I'm told. This means that you can have an installer program on that disk,
and only allow a limited number of installations from that disk.
But I can not see any way that this can be accomplished. If you copy a disk
you copy every byte of is, and thats that.
Any ideas?
- - - -
"Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of
himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?"
--- Thomas Jefferson
Lars Petrus, Solna, Sweden - pet...@stacken.kth.se
Tim Endres
In article <1992Nov11.1...@kth.se> (comp.sys.mac.programmer), pet...@stacken.kth.se (Lars Petrus) writes:
> Some software products are sold on disks that can not be copied - or so
> I'm told. This means that you can have an installer program on that disk,
> and only allow a limited number of installations from that disk.
>
> But I can not see any way that this can be accomplished. If you copy a disk
> you copy every byte of is, and thats that.
>
> Any ideas?
One way this is done is to use a special disk drive to write the disk
and write data at a higher rate than the typical Macintosh can write
it. However, the typical Mac drive is capable of reading this faster
written data. Thus, you can read it all day long, but you need the
special drive to write it.
I do not know if this is still done or not.
tim endres - ti...@ice.com
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Olaf Titz
> Some software products are sold on disks that can not be copied - or so
>I'm told. This means that you can have an installer program on that disk,
>and only allow a limited number of installations from that disk.
>
> But I can not see any way that this can be accomplished. If you copy a disk
>you copy every byte of is, and thats that.
This is only one of the reasons why Apple explicitly discourages the
use of copy protection schemes - all of them can be defeated.
I may disagree with Apple in many points, but I feel to that copy
protection is a Bad Thing.
olaf
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"Stop talkin' and start chalkin'!" - Eight Ball Deluxe
James Zuchelli
of the master disk that is not normally used by the operating system you are
running on.
Some disks for the Apple II series used a system that wrote the tracks in
a spiral pattern, completely different form the standard Apple II DOS.
However, be sure you want to do this, when I owned an Apple II I wouldn't buy
anysoftware that I couldn't make backup copies of. If The master disk
gets trashed and I need to get to a file, what am I supposed to do?
James Zuchelli
---------------
This is my opinion and not that of Claris Corp. or my Employer.
Paul Potts
>In article <1992Nov11.1...@kth.se>, pet...@stacken.kth.se (Lars Petrus) writes:
>>
>>
>> Some software products are sold on disks that can not be copied - or so
>> I'm told. This means that you can have an installer program on that disk,
>> and only allow a limited number of installations from that disk.
>>
>> But I can not see any way that this can be accomplished. If you copy a disk
>> you copy every byte of is, and thats that.
>>
>> Any ideas?
>>
In the bad old days of the Commodore-64, which had a programmable floppy
drive, companies would ship disks with specially written tracks that gave
different types of sector and track errors when read. Then hackers came up
with their own schemes to duplicate these bad sectors by programming the
drive to write bad sectors... and companies came out with disk cracking
programs that would sense the bad sectors and tracks and re-create them,
software developers came up with even more nefarious schemes... etc.
I'm glad those days seem to be gone... I once had to install some software
on a Mac from a disk that allowed a limited number of installs (some kind
of DNA sequencing program). Of course, the installer was buggy, though, and
so would crash halfway through an installation, but still tell you that
you had "used up" one of your installations. This was a big pain. We didn't
wind up doing any more business with that vendor.
--
Politics is crime pursued by other means.
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Nigel Stanger
> Some software products are sold on disks that can not be copied - or so
>I'm told. This means that you can have an installer program on that disk,
>and only allow a limited number of installations from that disk.
>
> But I can not see any way that this can be accomplished. If you copy a disk
>you copy every byte of is, and thats that.
One thing I've heard of is that you copy your software onto a
floppy, then physically wipe out one of the sectors on the disk
(maybe zap the surface coating with a laser or something -- I
don't really know how it's done). The software looks at this
sector when it runs, and the cunning thing is that it _expects_
to get a read error at this point. No matter how you copy the
disk, the copy program or whatever won't be able to recreate that
bad sector, so when the software tries to read it that sector and
_succeeds_ it screams "PIRATE! PIRATE!" and explodes :)
The only way to get around this is to figure out where the
program reads the dead sector and patch it out.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Nigel Stanger, Internet: sta...@otago.ac.nz
University of Otago, Phone: +64 3 479-8179
Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND. Fax: +64 3 479-8311
Peggy Babcock. Peggy Babcock. Peggy Babcock.
Eshel Liran
hole in it, using a laser beam. I think it costs the developer about
1$ per disk, and I don't think it can be copied.
Liran Eshel
Bar-Ilan Univeristy, ISRAEL
li...@bimacs.cs.biu.ac.il
Michael G. Reed
That method was popular on the old Apple ][ for a while until developers
were sued for damages...Appears that they would burn the hole out around the
outter edge of the disk, and then make sure the drive would never go there
in normal operation. The idea was that when the user tried to copy it, and
the head passed over the damaged area, it would destroy the read/write head.
Great, 'huh? Anyway, that's a thing of the past.
-Michael
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael G. Reed (re...@TC.Cornell.EDU)
Cornell National Supercomputing Facility (607)/254-8806
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Why be normal, it's boring; and boring people should be shot.
Note: These are not the views of my employer (and probably not mine either).