Re: Relax permissions for reading hard drive serial number?

["Dan Kegel" <dank@kegel.com>]

On Nov 29, 2007 7:37 AM, Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel@free.fr> wrote:
> > One sticking point is that apps like Photoshop and probably
> > Punkbuster want to retrieve the hard drive's serial number
>
> So they can't be installed on a network drive ?

I think Adobe supports that, though perhaps not with the
retail version.  Big companies with network drives are
probably an important revenue source for them.

I haven't looked closely at what happens when you try installing
onto network drives.  If you are really interested, it's pretty easy to
try yourself; just run the app under wine with
WINEDEBUG=+cdrom,+disk and look in the log for calls like
CreateFile("\\\\.\\PhysicalDrive0", ...).
There's some chance the code always checks drive 0 instead
of the drive you're installing onto.
- Dan