Path: cdrom.com!barrnet.net!sgiblab!sdd.hp.com!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!orca.es.com!bambam!jwallace From: jwallace@bambam.es.com (John Wallace) Newsgroups: alt.cd-rom Subject: Re: Test drive cd Date: 7 Jan 1994 20:56:00 GMT Organization: Design Systems Division, Evans & Sutherland, SLC, UT Lines: 55 Distribution: world Message-ID: <2gki90$plh@orca.es.com> References: <1994Jan2.220720.16708@seas.smu.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: 130.187.85.113 In article anita.nikiforuk@norton.spk.wa.us (Anita Nikiforuk) writes: >Subject: Re: Test drive cd > >Memory jogger ... from various messages re: Test drive CD: >+------------------------------------------------------- >|>The program DOCs state right from the beginning that even if you delete >|>the entire "Sample" directory, your computer is "marked" in such a way >|>as to prevent you from then re-installing the program and starting over. >| >|Have you heard of bluffing before ? ;-) >| >|>(BTW, no FILES are being written to any other area of the HD either.) >| >|Did you check it ? Or simply believed in what they say ? > >Oh, I've checked the simple things ... like the files in the TESTDRIV >directory and any additions made to the WIN.INI or SYSTEM.INI files. >That's why I came to my own hypothesis on what/where they were writing >information. I also checked many files but never found where the hidden info was stored on the disk. The most I was able to do was to delete some files and then the test drive would not work at all. What I did was to completely back up my drives before I even run the test drive disk. The only way I could get the program counts to drop to 0 was to fdisk the main drive reformat and reload the test drive CD. I purposely checked attributes and looked for those hidden files. The only conclusion I came to was that they were possibly twiddling some file at the bit level and avoiding having dos update the archive bits and date stamp. The warning notice with the test drive disk made me also feel like my disk was going to be invaded, which is why I backup up before I even ran the test drive program. I think I was able to delete most of the files by using the new dos 6 command deltree. But I had to remove the setup in my autoexec.bat that test drive installs and reboot to even get this to work properly. This setup they install points the testdrive directory at the C: disk and at the CD-rom Drive, E: (On my system). Trying to delete files in the test drive directory before you removed the testdrive setup would get your system to try to delete the files on the CD-ROM. This would obviously give an error. After loading testdrive and fisk/formatting the drive several times and reloading testdrive I had it down pat what I had to do to remove the test drive directory. Though just removing the test drive directory and reloading it was never enough to allow the test drive program to properly work. I even saved some of those files test drive creates in the windows directory to floppy, ran up the counts on the programs and releaded from floppy, but never found out which was the one. Eventually I gave up and can't even remember everything I tried. One thing I never did was to look closely at the obvious files. I was always playing with the "other dat" files. The obvious exe and hlp files may have been the ones that had some bits fiddled with?