My hard disk just died. The MBR was broken, and now it died. I've tried changing the SATA ports, but it's all the same. Coincidently this happen just after i installed a game from 1C which required Starforce 12 hours ago. Is this related? can i restore my hard disk back?

And btw, i'm using Windows 7 x64. My hard disk is WD used it since 5 years ago. Had several symptom such as random fail to start Windows, forever in "Windows is starting", rare BSOD but never had anything serious than that.

I installed Dawn of magic which had Gamersgate Starforce with no issues a few months back.

Somehow I doubt it.

Perhaps it's just now galloping in better place with other older computer items in some cloud. And I also think that it must have been just some evil coincidence. Still, usually hard drives are pretty tough cookie and hardly ever really break.

You need to boot off your Win7 disc to get your MBR back. Probably best to google it for further info.

I was going to try that out, but the motherboard can't detect the hard disk anymore. Master Hard Disk error message pop out after long boot sequence, something like that.

Reply placeholder but ignore it I cant I read properly.

Supposedly Starforce is no longer that bad. But I'm not touching it and it wouldn't suprise me if it did some evil stuff to your hard drive..

Starforce never touched hard disks, it only blew up optical drives (speaking from experience, Sold Out Praetorians was the last disc to go into that drive).

i don't know if it ever was, but the reports scared me enough not to install it again, even though i have a few older Codemasters titles "protected" by StarForce.

was there anything to the reports of SF wrecking optical and hard disc drives? i somehow doubt it but then again, i wouldn't want to take that chance.

I guess it's time to buy a new one. After all, i remember 4 years ago at the time i bought my Western Digital, there were numerous report about short life span of the product. 4 years to me, seems like a short one. My old HDD (ATA or maybe PATA) still kicking ass.

Old SF (the one that stopped working with V/W7) used to alter the way OS handled CD drives. One of the results of that tampering was the OS developing zero tolerance for CD read errors. Normally they are allowed and the missing data is re-read in case of an error. SF made drivers behave differently, and the error policy became that of a hard drive - if it doesn't read on the first try, panic. So, you put in a scratched or poorly balanced disk, the system reports read errors and starts slowly decreasing data transfer speed. At some point DMA is switched the fuck off and the drive goes into PIO mode - every bit of data read from it has to go through the CPU instead of directly to RAM. Read speed become abysmal and it slows down the entire system in the process. The only cure was to remove the drive in device manager and reboot, hoping it's detected as brand new hardware and goes online without the DMA-block.

holy crap!

and the new version of SF? more like SecuROM now?

and how do you tell what version of SF is used? does it depend on the age of the game?

Yeah, the windows even look the same.

AFAIK, the dreaded old SF was never used for digital distribution. It did have an option to disable checks on a game using hardware hash and an individual key, but that was only something you'd get through tech support.

I've had several PC hard drives go into some bad state, especially when they have been connected through USB. Some got even some HW problem.

But of course it is a different thing to talk about the filesystem going haywire, or some HW problem occurring. I dislike closed external USB hard disks for that reason, because if the disk does not work anymore when there is still warranty left, you have to make a decision:

- Open the USB casing in order to connect it directly to your PC, in order to see if you can salvage the data inside. But this voids the warranty, so if it was a HW problem in the hard disk itself, you will not get a refund/replacement anymore.

- Send the whole unit for a replacement, but then you lose all the data inside, in case it was some simple HW problem in the casing, not the hard disk itself.

That's why I prefer buying the USB casing and hard disks separately from each other, then trying to salvage your data does not void the warranty. Nowadays that's even cheaper at least here, because the local "RIAA/MPAA"-tax (Teosto-maksu) is collected only for external HD drives, not internal HD drives. I don't understand why, but fine by me.