Gizzmoe how about three roms in a row. I talked to a rather afluent buddy of mine last night who has thrown away not one but three roms after the advent of SF. He though it was just normal wear and tear. But the symptoms decribed here is was common to all three. Coincidence I think not. SC I will PM you with something I have found shortly.

By the by I cracked my game last night. I am honest about it I don't want to risk screwing up my rom or further damaging the disk. It is a totaly legal copy - believe me I should know after being had with an illegal copy (refer to this post http://forums.ubi.com/groupee/forums...2/m/9061007863) - but I will not risk my expensive equipment and valueble disk for being honest.

I'm NOT defending SF here but I did hear that after the latest Windows service pack that some burners started to fail, has anybody else heard this?

A question to the people who have NOT had problems, how many of you actually do burn disks, may be you have a problem with your drive and don't know it yet?

Yeah, it´s mysterious, but the story lacks some very important details, so it´s impossible to come to a conclusion.

OK, I typed in Google search 'starforce problems' I got lots of links to threads in various forums complaining about SF, it seems we are not alone.

Yes, there were links to warez sites too and ways to do illegal stuff, and yes, there are pirates we know that, but hell of a lot of ordinary folks out there have had problems through SF, way too many for my liking.
On the pirate issue, software companies do need to find a protection to stop piracy, fair enough, but if the protection system they use stops people from buying their software then what will they do?

Again please don't publish any ways of illegal copying/cracks or this thread will close, we need to keep it open.

I just want to emphasize the fact that I do did not say how to do it but that I did it. No to be scally (a expresion from SA meaning crooked) but because I don't want to see my writer heading out the door soon. :(

Desperation leads to extreme measures. Ask any submarine veteran who has survived a sinking sub.

Well this is what I've started to do, but I have to say the noise the drive makes when spinning in this 'SF' way is most deffinitely not the sound it used to make when reading or burning at high speed (52x). The normal sound is/was a kind of smooth humming, whereas this 'new' sound keeps cycling up and down at a much higher pitch- so much so that when it first happened I thought one of my HD's was on the way out... I could feel/hear the vibration resonate through my case quite clearly, which has never happened before during the course of normal drive opperation.

If taking the disk out of the drive when I have finnished using it is a quirk I'm going to have to get used to, then I can tollerate that to a point. But if the operation of my drive is going to be compromised to the extent that it is nolonger useable as a burner as the manufacturers spec states, then I'm going to have to consider draconian software policies like formatting my pc and throwing all products that contain SF in the bin- which will be a shame as SH3 will never come back in that case, given that it is the only game I play offline and is a great break from my usual FPS style-ings; this will be very unfortuneate.

If it is proved beyond certainty that SF is or will kill my drive, then I'm not going to stand there and bend over and spread 'em for a second helping, seeing as my drive (when I bought it new) cost about 3 times as much as any damn game, I will be a very, very angry bunny indeed :stare:
If a new game is going to cost me the servicability and price of a new DVD-RW drive because of (speculation) some companies dodgey copy protection software, then I will have to find a way to 'return' the favour and figure out the best way to cost them money and time and a trip to the shops for some new hardware and see how they like being out of pocket at my convenience- now how likely is that?! :nope:

I only hope it is not so, because if it is, then everybody will loose out in the long run- ok the individual end user will suffer more than the company at the end of the day, but this very much seems to be par for the course these days and accepted that as a consumer, you should take 'whatever is handed out to you wheather it works correctly or not, and be humbly, cap tippingly greatful damnit! that we condescend to spread our pearls before such swine as you.' :down:

There, I've said my bit, but I think I'm starting to rant a bit now, so I'm going to stop before I get any more worked up about the impending possibility of my drive being borked by SF.

Okay call me irrasional call me mad. But I swear if I get another blue screen... Been trying insuccesfully to install Alchohol on a brand new lap top with a writer on which I installed SH 3.

Well lets say that it wasn't so before SH 3 and now it is so. It may be because of SF or not but the fact is it is happening. So a question to the tech guys what will cause these screens and why would alcoholhave a problem with the virtual drivers? Please I don't want to format.

I had to get into safe mode and do a system restore on the lap top. I will not come near it with SH 3 or any SF game agian ever. Sorry I have work on it and will not take any chances.

Buy the cheapest DVD drive that you can get (costs less than 20€) and use that for game CDs/DVDs instead of your expensive writer, that´s the best solution.

Does that mean then that SF drivers only interfere with the drive they are installed with or run on, or do the make 'system wide' changes to hardware regardless of being actually run on it?

As far as I know it´s a system wide change. My point was that it´s much cheaper to replace a broken DVD reader than a broken writer. Use the writer only to write things.

Hmmm, still not the ideal solution now is it? How would that guarantee not stuffing both drives if SF makes system wide changes? :dead:
Oh well, another one bites the dust. I'm going to finnish Sniper Elite, then consider my options for a while. And after that, well I'll probably never buy or use anything with SF on it again; assuming of course the packaging tells me it's there first. Talk about having to cut your nose off to spite your face :sigh: maybe SF can sell their own brand of compattible DVD roms with each game purchased? pffft :/\chop

My suggestion would only guarantee that SF (if it can really do that) doesn´t physically damage your writer.

Gizzmoe, am I wrong here or what, you say it makes a system wide change, well won't that also effect the writer too?

Either ways, I appreciate the suggestions for 'work arounds'. If I have any spare time this week I might try out one of our spare drives from work and see what we can see...

Yes. But you would only use the writer to write discs, and SF wouldn´t damage that drive if you don´t read from it and if you don´t leave media in during a reboot. If Soulcommander is right the biggest problem is the boot process and only then if there´s a disc in the drive.

Am I totally " out of order" in believing that SF shouldn't damage ANY drive....EVER ?

DEAR ALL



Following an email support request directly held to starforce people, here what i did get. Must say it only took days (4), and the "fix" did work.

Thanks to all of you who did send me PM to try to help ...


direct cut and past from email:

Hello

Try going to device manager, find the IDE controllers there and uninstall them. The try rebooting, the IDE controllers should appear back. In addition, try removing the protection drivers with the tool that you can find here: http://www.star-force.com/protection/users/

If problem remains send us your system information file. You can generate such file using Start menu: Start -> Run -> msinfo32 -> save as text file.

Best regards.
-----------------
Sergei Komissarov
Customer Support Group
StarForce Technologies

The information of this letter is confidential and must not be disclosed to third persons.

Gizzmoe, while I certainly respect your opinion, and can recognize most of your points as being well thought out and valid, I find this apparent attitude of "Let's change our hardware to fix/avoid/troubleshoot the software bugs" to be particularly alarming. This is the reason I no longer buy 3000ad products. I feel the consumer should dictate what hardware he/she will buy and install, not the other way around.

If I create any type of product to sell to you for use on something of yours, it is my responsibility to ensure that it works correctly, not yours, and I while I might suggest some workarounds, or ask you to do some rudimentary troubleshooting regarding the apparent bug, I certainly would not expect you to buy extra hardware in pursuit of this.

I've never heard of this until now - now I'm afraid that one or both of my burners has been destroyed and I don't even know about it. I only heard that certain burners would be disabled.

The computer on which I have SH3 installed has two burners - a 52x24x52x LG CD-RW and a ASUS DVD-RW (40 read x, 16 r/rw x) although I don't know the model numbers right now. I burned three music CDs a couple of months ago with the CD-RW and they turned out alright, and both drives can read alright. I also haven't noticed either drive speeding up to ultra speeds. I won't be able to test further until I go home in two days.

Has anyone reported problems with LG or ASUS drives? Does the problem affect read capability? Can I avoid damage by not rebooting with the disk in the drive, or not removing the disk during game play? Does it even effect CD/CD-RW drives?

Right now, I am considering removing SH3 - I never would have bought it in the first place if I had known about this. I will certainly never buy SH IV, or anything else that uses StarForce.