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LouP12-Amethyst
12-Amethyst
January 26, 2016
Question

Strange behavior with license recovery (2 out of 3)

  • January 26, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 4056 views

I have an office PC that has mathcad 11, mathcad 15, and prime all installed, and all were working as expected. I started getting notices from Win7 that the hard drive was failing, with warnings to copy everything. Our IT did manage to clone the complete hard drive, and replaced the new drive in the same PC. Almost everything works; the one exception being the one piece of SW that cannot be reinstalled and licensed now.  The strange thing is that Mathcad 15 and Prime load and work as expected, with no hints of license problems. However when I try to start Mathcad 11, I get a message that the license file is corrupted. Of course, there is no server nor manual support now, so I'm looking for straws to grasp, as the one version I really wanted to keep is Mathcad 11; the others can always be reinstalled.

The hard drive is cloned, so I expect it should be completely transparent to all of the software. I did check that the disk name and volume ID are the same as the old drive.I had copied the license file folder separately, and I tried substituting that for the cloned version; but got the same error message.

Any thoughts on possible recovery options?

Lou

2 replies

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LucMeekes23-Emerald IV
23-Emerald IV
January 26, 2016

Lou,

I assume you're talking about the single-user Mathcad 11, with Cdilla as licensing.

What I know for sure is that the disk 'serial number'/Volume ID (four hex digits, a dash and another four hex digits) as written by the Microsoft OS is used by this licensing method.

With the support on Mathcad 11 being dropped, which includes the license corruption repair being disabled, there is no way you can get Mathcad 11 installed on a new machine, but also the corruption repeair does not work.

As far as I know, Mathcad 11 writes a signature on a part of the HD that normally is not used, outside of partitions. It is used to detect that mathcad was installed before and prevents that one could use the 15 days free trial period repeatedly by just re-installing the software. {The tric is fairly effective: You can get rid of the signature by wiping the first part of the disk, sector-wise: that is regardless of partitioning etc. Means you can only do this if you don't care about the OS etc.}

So if your image only included the data that was stored - within - partitions, the signature is lost, resulting in a corruption detection on startup of Mathcad 11.

Another option is that the full storage size of the disk and/or the serial number of the physical disk are included in the corruption check.

I'm afraid there is no way to restore. Another lost Mathcad 11.

Luc

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LouP12-AmethystAuthor
12-Amethyst
January 26, 2016

How can one find and copy the data not In partitions? It must be accessible, since Mathcad did it. DOes this not copy over in a clone?

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RichardJ19-Tanzanite
19-Tanzanite
January 26, 2016

There's no simple way for you to access anything that's not in a partition. You need to look at the disk at a very low level to do that.

It copies over in some clones (e.g. Macrium), but I don't know that it copies over in all clones.

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RichardJ19-Tanzanite
19-Tanzanite
January 26, 2016

Do you still have the old hard drive? I cloned my hard drive once to replace it with a solid state drive, and although it was a few years ago I'm pretty sure Mathcad 11 worked fine, and did not require a new license. I hope so, anyway, because I'm thinking of doing the same thing in my current PC because a SSD makes the whole PC run much faster. I used a piece of software called Macrium Reflect (http://www.macrium.com/pages/comparisons.aspx) to do that. It's not that expensive. I used the home edition, because the free version is not good enough for this.

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LucMeekes23-Emerald IV
23-Emerald IV
January 26, 2016

Hmmm. Are you sure you managed to do that without the license repair?

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RichardJ19-Tanzanite
19-Tanzanite
January 26, 2016

As I said, no I am not 100% sure. It was a few years ago, but as I recall I was very surprised that no software at all needed a new license,which would have included MC11. It's possible I misremember though.

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