Re: Copy Protected Disk

[Benjamin Story <bstory@bullets.net>]

The company doesn't seem open to American copyright fair use laws.
They are a Canadian company and they offered to sell me a backup disk
for the same price as the original (how nice).  

I've tried to use open source alternatives (etherboot), but
unfortunately the set of machines in question has a motherboard on
which all of the NIC chips are miswired.  This causes problems with
etherboot and I didn't find anyone who had figured out a way to work
around it.  The company's disk however, worked which saved me some
headaches considering that I'm not a C or ASM programmer that could
fix etherboot.  

I will say however that these PXE boot disks work great with PXES
(Linux Thin Client) from pxes.sourceforge.net


On Tue, Apr 22, 2003 at 11:01:51PM +0000, mike808@users.sourceforge.net wrote:
> > I was recently forced to buy software to make my old workstations boot
> > PXE.  The software comes in the form of a bootable floppy.  I could
> > like to make a couple backup copies as I don't trust floppies.
> > Unfortunately the disks are copy protected to the point that a dd
> > if=/dev/fd0 of=disk.img produces a bad copy.  Any suggestions would be welcome.
> 
> Write the publisher and explain to them your concerns.
> Ask them how you should go about exercising your fair use rights to make such a
> backup. Explain to them that you are certain their company is a fine one, 
> but given the recent economic market, you cannot really take the risk of placing
> your company's future in the fate of their ability to support this product.
> 
> Perhaps you can purchase backup floppies from them. Do so and place them in a
> safe. Ask them if this ability to produce these magic floppies is held in
> escrow, just in case they sell out to a competitor or shutters its doors?
> 
> If that doesn't help, ask your shareholders or management if those scenarios 
> don't scare the willies out of them by placing so much risk into these 
> floppies operating properly - with NO recourse. Remember those "No warranty", 
> "AS IS", and "not fit for any purpose" clauses in the license you agreed to?
> 
> Surely there is a much lower risk Open Source solution available to you.
> 
> Does this help?
> http://www.kano.org.uk/projects/pxe/
> http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php
> http://www.nilo.org/
> 
> Mike808/
> 
> 
> ---------------------------------------------
> http://www.valuenet.net
> 
> 
> 
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Benjamin Story
 
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