Good Evening everyone. A newby right here and require some advice on the following. I have two DVD burners - a Sony DRU500AX and a Pioneer DLV 108 DL I normally use Games X Copy to make backups of my games, store the original and then play using the backupcopy. Many times I use the Daemon Virtualdrive. However I have just purchased the Codemasters Game Liverpool Club Football 2005. I have attempted copy and went well But the clone will not work and the launch prog tells me to put the original CD in. The virtual drives will not successfully load the image - same message. Firt time i have heard of starforce and notice in Device Drivers that some sort of device has been put there by the installer of the game. Please can someone advise 1. How i can backup and use the backup of my game, and secondly how to get it to work on the virtual drive if required...please
Games X Copy is a dinosaur of a program, and I'm surprised you've had success in the past with it. You need Alcohol 120%, Clone CD, or Blindwrite. Unfortunately Starforce protected games cannot be copied without major hassle at this time. What I mean by major hassle is, with some versions of starforce you'll need to make your image, and then disconnect your Secondary IDE (manually or through BIOS)as in your physical optical drives, and disable any virtual drives. This is only known to work with older versions of Starforce. There is also a method of making mini images that works well, but still requires disabling your IDE Channel.
Crikey I didn't realise it was so much trouble. I disabled and then deleted the drivers in the Device manager. stripped registry entries, attempted to load the game and craftily the drivers reinstall themselves without warning. I tried to collect the Blindwrite software - from multiple sources - then try to install and it will not have it - i wonder if the starforce is stopping this from working
The actual protection drivers starforce install with the game are invisible. You can only remove them by uninstalling the game and then downloading a cleaning utility from the starforce website.
Yep, thats what I have done. I then used Blindwrite to make my backup. The game installed successfully, try to launch to play and hey presto, exactly the same result as before - failure and the protection drivers back in place. Blindwrite was unable to do this game after all. I wonder if anyone has any suggestions or pointers. The CD is owned by me so I have time to find out a solution but its just very frustrating. Games X Copy may be a dinosaur but its easily back up all my latest games with no issues - this one however is an issue. Look forward to hearing more from you all with a lot more expertise than I. Kind Regards
Alright I cant guarantee this will work but its your only chance. Remember Starforce 3 doesn't do atip checks or blacklist virtual drives as some people have come to believe. What it does is check the settings of your physical drives, that's why you can't make a backup to run in your physical drives. Also it checks other protected files from your hdd to see if they match, that's why it is important to delete the data of your image backup to make the Starforce check only the dpm settings. The starforce check only checks the basic data position measurement information on the cd. That is why a mini-image works, the d.p.m settings are close enough to allow it to pass the copy-protection check. To make a mini-image you need to make a image read in Alcohol 120% using the Starforce 1/2/3 profile, then save the original mds. (this is critical) Take the mdf and load it in UltraISO and delete all the data off it as this is necessary to pass the starforce check. If you have the latest UltraISO you can save the new image as a mdf, if not save a cue/bin file, trash the cue and rename the bin to mdf to preserve the d.p.m readings. Now, disable your optical drive IDE in you bios or physically, load the edited mdf file together with the original mds and it should work. You know you are successful when your mds is about 30 kb, and your mdf is about 60 kb. This link at alcohol-soft forums is also an excellent guide. http://forum.alcohol-soft.com/index.php?showtopic=13836
Thanks Pollushon. I tried it exactly as described but Starforce rejected this. As it was a Sunday and i wanted to play play play, I thought i'd load up MOH Pacific Assult on the Virtual Drive. Now iget messages from the system that I have to disable CD/DVD Emulation software and remover Virtual Drives. OK, I done this. Same message. Tried other Games and exactly the same so I'm in pain now. Removed the games (Uninstalled) recreated and reinstalled but same problem. By last night I tore my hair out. I am going nuts over this. Ha ha, i know - System Resote but hey presto message says unable to restore. Now there is no way i'm rebuilding this system (I do have a backup of 6 weeks ago if need be). Any other thoughts or logical explanations anybody.
