Copy protection

[Tim Schmidt]

On 10/5/06, Christoph Frick <frick at sc-networks.de> wrote:
> and its very unlikely, that a sane person would WINE allow writing
> to the MBR (or close to it). right?

OK...

This discussion is veering off somewhat, but I believe it's heading in
a fairly constructive direction.

What we're talking about here is a class of applications that expect
raw (or nearly-raw) disk access:

- copy-protection that writes mysterious things to or near the MBR
- various utility software (virus scanners, disk defragmenters,
forensic tools, etc.)
- other possibilities?

Some of these tools - the forensic tools and copy-protected apps
especially - would be nice if they worked on Wine.  The two have
different needs though...  Presumably the forensic tools would be
working on real drives - or copies of real drives.  They need actual
access.  The copy-protection schemes do potentially dangerous things
to actual drives - they need to be sandboxed in virtual drives that
appear real.

It sounds like a general framework for routing these kind of raw disk
i/o would be useful...  probably configurable by app would be most
useful.

thoughts?