Floppy protection

[Gimly]

Hi everybody,

I distribute my program on a Floppy disk, is there any way I can protect my program from being copied from the stiffy eg Dragged / Pasted on the HDD and then copied to another stiffy. I did read that you can register the floppy serial number on the HDD, but I have no idea how to check what a stiffy's serial number is or how to register it on the HDD.

If any of you have any idea on how I can go about "securing" the floppy from being copied, your help will be greatly appreciated.

Regards
Gimly

 

[ponerse]

Besides using some kind of dongle that you need to run your program, I really doubt you can keep your app from being copied.

 

[vb5prgrmr]

Actually that is not true ponerse. There was an old dos program/game/star trek, I think it was, and every time I wanted to copy it I was given an error message, but it would install fine. I never did try to figure that one out but I do know it can be done.

Gimly, good luck

 

[johnwm]

The traditional method of stopping floppies from being copied was to 'get down and dirty' and alter the sector header information for one sector of the disk. DOS then read it as a faulty sector and refused to copy it. The rest of your program will load, then patch the DOS to read the 'duff' sector then continue with the load.

That routine was soon defeated by the 'copydisk' utilities, which copied a whole track regardless of format or sector information

To attempt this feat you will need to access actual hardware, which is fairly well protected in modern OS's

For background on floppy sector layouts etc. you can try here:

http://members.iweb.net.au/~pstorr/pcbook/book4/floppyd.htm

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[Gimly]

Thank you all for your replies and help, it is much appreciated.

Regards
Gimly