Strange behavior with license recovery (2 out of 3)

[LouP]

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

[LucMeekes]

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

[LouP]

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?

[RichardJ]

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.

[LouP]

Acronis 2011 was used to create the clone of the hard drive. It obviously didn't copy everything.

[RichardJ]

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.

[LucMeekes]

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

[RichardJ]

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.

[LucMeekes]

It's not that you 'need a new license'. You would get a message (like Lou said) that the 'license file is corrupted' and Mathcad would offer to repair it, completed in a breeze and is a one time action without requiring you to enter any info, codes or whatever. Just requires you to press OK, an internet connection........and the remote service to connect to, which PTC have shut down 2015-4-1.

Luc

[RichardJ]

The remote service for MC11 was on the Mathsoft server, which was shut down a long time before that. It would have been some time early to mid 2014 when I changed hard drive, by which time the Mathsoft server was long gone. The only way to activate it was manually, after acquiring a license from PTC. I don't recall doing that, but maybe I have just forgotten. I have activated so many copies of Mathcad so many times over the years it does tend to blur together

[LouP]

I made some images at home using the free version of Macrium Reflect, but have not had the need to try a restore as yet. What is the difference between the home version and the free version that makes "the free version is not good enough for this?"

The original, failing hard drive is still available, since they (IT) rightly figured that it may be useful if not everything worked as planned.

Luc - I wasn't aware of the signature bit outside of partitions, whatever that means. Is this something that a normal clone won't copy? I can check to see what SW was use to create the clone and report back. Richard's clone copy seemed to bring along anything that was relevant to Mathcad 11.

As mentioned, I'm hoping to keep this from being another lost 11. The 15 version on the machine will run the simulations I need to use, so I'm still operable, but I do find minor tweaks and function differences that take a few edits to make some 11 sheets run on 15. Haven't t as yet checked to see if the 15 compatible sheets run without edits on 11. I find version 15 to be noticeably slower, even without a bunch of scripted controls.

[RichardJ]

The free (a.k.a. trial) version does not allow you to restore images to dissimilar hardware. So it's OK for restoring backups to the same drive, but it will not restore those backups to a different drive. I'm not sure if there is any difference in the backups themselves, or it's only the ability to restore them to different hardware.

Macrium Reflect clones everything. It creates a pure bit-by-bit disk image.

[LucMeekes]

I should think that a 'normal' clone of a harddisk might only copy the partition data (the data inside a partition).

In this case a bit-by-bit copy of all raw data on the harddisk would be needed.... and then hope Mathcad does not detect corruption.

I know for a fact that erasing all partitions and repartitioning a harddisk does not suffice to clear the Mathcad signature. And having experimented with wiping the raw disk from the start would only require it to run for a short time to destroy the signature. I guess it must be located on the first cylinder of the disk, but after the partition table.

Success!
Luc