New way to defeat starforce 3.6

[neptun]

Hi everybody.I suggess to make this thread some kind of guide how to bypass the starforce protection.I will tell the way it works for me and i hope that this will work for other people also.My harddisk is SerialATA so i have only optical drives attached to my IDE controller.So to play starforce protected games i just disable my IDE controller in device manager ( The whole IDE controller not the optical drives ) , mount the image in daemon tools 4 and play.After playing i just enable again the IDE controller and my optical drives appear again.No need to restart.I tested this with Prince of persia T2T and in a few hours i will test it with X3 Reunion also.I will be very happy if somebody with sata harddrive can test this way with other starforce games.

Update: This trick works for X3 Reunion also.

[LostS0uL]

heres an interesting thing that happenned to me: i installed the game from dt4 drive
turned off pc
unplugged cd/dvd roms
start pc
check if game works, it worked
shutdown pc
plugged in cd/dvd drives
start pc
goto device manager
on the wiwv tab there is a sahow hidden devices
click it
there will appear a non plug and play thing in the hardware list
look for starforce
there should be 4 of them
uninstall all
and after it restart
pc rebooted
mount image into dt4, play the game whit your cd/dvd drives NOT plugged out
thats it
works after it to
no changes needed
I hope thios will work for other people too

[Nightmare]

@neptun: Nice, but I haven't a S-ATA-HDD

@LostS0uL: Your method sounds very good. But can you make a screenshot of the step

goto device manager
on the wiwv tab there is a sahow hidden devices
click it
there will appear a non plug and play thing in the hardware list
look for starforce
there should be 4 of them

please?
That will be very helpful!
I haven't any Starforce-protected games yet. But I want to buy Prince Of Persia: TTT in a few days. So I want to be prepared for it
And do you know if it helps, when I disable my optical drives via BIOS, instead unplugging them??

And which game did you installed?

Greets

[copy2012]

I also have a SATA drive, tried the same technique with no result

[doomerdgr8]

Show Hidden Devices:




My SATA & PATA HDDs + DVDWriter+Alcohol 120% Virtual Drive:


Expanding Non-PnP Devices to reveal 4 StarForce Devices....


I have not tested it though but I am looking for a correct way to get rid of SF drivers/Devices from my system...

[Efebeter]

Not all drivers wants to uninstall whats more after every uninstall system asks to reboot and it doesnt resolve the problem of Worms Mayhem

[neptun]

Originally Posted by copy2012

I also have a SATA drive, tried the same technique with no result

Did you disable the whole IDE Controller in IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers section in device manager?For me personally i need to disable NVIDIA nForce4 Parallel ATA Controller for this to work but if you use standard drivers you may have more than one device ( for example you can have Primary channel and secondary channel ) and in this you need to disable both of them for this to work.

[falsenews]

Ok I did what LostS0uL suggested, which seems to nearly work fine. The only problem I'm running into is that, even though I can delete the files in system32/drivers... but they keep being reinstalled (or return in some other way) after say 2 seconds, causing all starforce stuff to be reinstalled...any idea on how to avoid the driver files to return?

[neptun]

Originally Posted by Nightmare85

@neptun: Nice, but I haven't a S-ATA-HDD

@LostS0uL: Your method sounds very good. But can you make a screenshot of the step please?
That will be very helpful!
I haven't any Starforce-protected games yet. But I want to buy Prince Of Persia: TTT in a few days. So I want to be prepared for it
And do you know if it helps, when I disable my optical drives via BIOS, instead unplugging them??

And which game did you installed?

Greets

Disabling in BIOS doesn't help.I tried it.

[drslavke]

here is the deal

made an image in al120

pluged evrything off,

maut in dt4, tried antiblaxx, sfcure, actualy tried evrything i could find

when i start the game, he sad somthing about disc key doesnnt corespond with the disc in the drive whyy, it' s the write key


what should i do??

P.S. sorry4E

[neptun]

maybe your image is not good enough.Some drives cannot read DPM info correctly.The decision is to download .mds file with good dpm info for the game and replace the .mds file from your image with the good .mds.In the topic for Prince of persia the two thrones you can find a link to a german website with .mds files for different games.Good luck.

[ApocalypseNow]

This is just logical suggestion. Facts:

• games use 3/4 SF drivers for copy protection when they start
• when they start, they replace all the registry values of driver services in HKEY_LOKCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\ & all the sf driver files in sys32

So, 2 tactics:

• try to deny permissions 4 these files & reg values
• some bruteforcing prog to replace the driver files & their reg values every couple of seconds or less

& ur asking "replace with what"?! I say replace reg path with path to sfdrvxx.sys with path to sfcure01.sys & sf driver sys files crap with sfcure01.sys (renamed to their name, of course!)

This is just theoreticising, dunno does it work, so anyone can make bruteforcer/ hasn't got so complicated user, group & permission structure, should try this and post the results here

[Yggdrasil]

I have two IDE controllers : Primary and Secondary.
I can only deactivate the secondary IDE controller. How deactivating the primary controller ? Help me plz.
Unplugging it would be to enervating, so plz help me !!

[ByteMare]

Originally Posted by ApocalypseNow

So, 2 tactics:

• try to deny permissions 4 these files & reg values
• some bruteforcing prog to replace the driver files & their reg values every couple of seconds or less

SF pretty much hooks into every necessary stuff it needs and doing some really funny stuff to prevent you from tampering with its drivers. Therefore, it's not an easy task, but it can be done

[Hellyy]

i have 2 harddiscs and i have primary and secondary IDE if i disable secondary IDE my 2 Drives DVD/CDRW are disabled but my secondary HD is also disabled i've tried with alcohol and DT4 nothing works i disabled by Device Manager
I've been searching a lot i haven't tried this solution but the only one who seems to work in this case for those who don't have nForce Parallel or have this problem like me the only way is to:
Uninstall POP3 Starforce & Alcohol
Mount the game with DT4 install but dont open it
Turn off and pc disable IDE
Turn on PC and run the game you will have to reboot it again due to starforce drivers...
This way works 100% but its boring because when u want to play u have to Disable IDE manually and Re enable IDE so u have to have PC Open....
I hope it will be a NO-CD/DVD Fix like Prince of Persia Warrior Within which has one ST Fix.......