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.

Boy, I sure hope my drive is ok. I'm not sure if it is or not. I built my new computer back in March. I used the DVD-RW drive very little, because I didn't have many programs to install at the time. Shortly after, I got SHIII. My drive doesn't make a loud whizzing sound when I boot-up - even with a CD in the drive. It does make a loud whizzing sound when a CD starts or Autoplay kicks in. I've been figuring it is the nature of the beast (reads CDs at 48x). It is a Lite-On Dual Layer DVD-RW.

http://www.liteonamericas.com/us/DVDRW_1673S.htm

So far I can burn and read discs ok. If it dies I will be quite unhappy, to say the least. The only game I have with Starforce is SHIII. Chances are I will not get any other game with SF (even if that means no SHIV). :cry:

Guys, it isn´t even clear if SF really can destroy drives! For me it´s still some kind of urban legend. Soulcommander has unfortunately ignored my question about how many people reported destroyed drives to him and if that number is much higher than the usual failure rate of such drives. He simply thinks that SF killed his Plextor drive, but he has no proof.

After reading through this thread, I'm also not convinced at this point that SF can physically ruin hardware.

I've had 2 DVD burners replaced in recent machines. Neither had SF installed on them.

That being said, it's obvious that SF is agressively intrusive and certainly interferes with many a system's software/driver functionability.

I have had a lot of CD-ROMs wear out for no reason - they're still in a pile next to the rest of my old computer parts (I never throw anything out). But you're right, we don't know for sure what's happening.

I have also noticed my 5.25" floppy is not working properly anymore (yes, 5.25"). All disks show up as blank 1.2MB, whether or not they are actually 360Kb or have information written on them. It worked fine until about a week after I installed SH3. I also noticed that since installing the game, occasionally when accessing games on CD or DVD, the 5.25 floppy starts up as if there is a disk in it. Meanwhile, a different 5.25 floppy on another of my computers with Windows XP Pro works fine.

Weird...is this some side effect no one knows about? I doubt the floppy is destroyed though - disks still can be read even if they show up with the wrong format and without information on them. Of course, an old 5.25 floppy from a discarded 486 isn't worth as much as a new DVD-RW ($0 compared to $80-$150).

Anyway, I would really like to know if my optical drives are in any danger. Even if they are all right now, maybe they could be destroyed in the future. I might have to remove the game anyway - I can't take a chance on $300 worth of hardware.

No, I don´t think so. You wrote in another post that you´ve never noticed excessive drive speed, there´s no reason to believe that SF harms your hardware.

Well, is there anything I can do to keep it that way? For example, not rebooting with a disk in the drive?

Yeah, remove the disk if you like.

Very good point sir! I have SP! installed when my drive was affected. After troubleshooting (3 reformatts) I decided to take the plunge and now have sp2 installed but no SHIII or Starforce.

Well if an apple falls from the tree that your standing under and hits you on the head you don't look at the apple and say where did you come from. And you don't look at the tree and say why are there apples on it. When countless people are having issues like this and its right after the install of SHIII with Starforce on it or soon after you don't discredit them. Ubisoft has told me there are problems related to Starforce. Please stop trying to discredit us that have problems.

I agree in that it very well may not physically destroy them, but it DOES appear to make them cease to function. (At which point I think most people would consider it a matter of symantics.) If it don't work, it don't work!

In my case, it don't work (burn) ever since I installed the game. IF I have to rebuild my system, (and yes, for the benefit of the person who was confused about this in an earlier post, formatting and reinstalling software IS called rebuilding), then I may as WELL go out and buy another drive. (Assuming of course that I could install it with any potential SF registry keys left in or DLL's that is)

So, destroyed or not, functionality is impaired and that is certainly enough for me, and I think most everyone else.

S