Q: Char Studio Evaluation

[Mahlon]

This is a big gripe of mine, too. I was finally able to test it out on a 'virgin' machine, but I did everything except flash my bios on my main computer to try and access CS4.

Darv explained what happened in thread at the discreet forum and it was something which they could not control. You can do a search for it there. Anyway, discreet is working on the problem.

Meanwhile, there really is no way around it. Which is too bad 'cause CS4 fairly rocks. I went ahead and purchased a license for us based on my 3 day 'weekend' evaluation.

Best thing I can say do is try to get access to a machine that has never seen max. You might as well not try formatting hard drives, replacing harddrives, etc. because the c-dilla license must be way deep at the bios. Flashing your bios might work. I was only moments away from doing that, when I remembered that I could take it to my mothers house and try it on her computer -- so I never did. But you might send an e-mail to discreet and ask them if flashing the bios would work.

Only other alternative right now would be to contact your reseller and see if they can get discreet to set you up with a temporary authorization.

Good luck. Try it out if you can. It's a pretty important upgrade to CS3.

Mahlon:beer:

[Reality3D]

One thing Mahlon, flashing the bios makes no sense. C-dilla isn't at Bios, maybe it's in the Hd boot, not Bios. It's impossible from what i know to put a program at bios.

[Maven]

Well I have talked to tech support and my reseller and they both said the same thing..." go pound sand."

So I am going to try and find a spare machine to run my evaluation.

Thanks for replying Mahlon, at least I know I am not the only one.

[Mahlon]

Reality 3d,

Where is the hard disk boot? Does that reside on the motherboard? I ask because when trying to wipe cdilla off my system, I used a totally new hard drive, and took every other drive out of the system. So all that was in the system was the motherboard, the video card, and a brand-new unformatted hard drive. And still, a prior verion of max was detected.

Mahlon

[Reality3D]

It's at the boot sector of the hard disk. It's very strange what you say. For me it's impossible that a program rewrites the flash-eprom of the bios and insert it's code in it, and therefore your experiment seems imho impossible. Anyone knows exactly how cdilla acts with the system?

[gaggle]

Whenever I've formatted I've never encountered something that would seem to suggest MAX knew that it had been there before.

Could you give an example of this spookey sticky-knowledge?

As far as I know C-Dilla is no more than a couple of files in the root of the harddrive, installing itself as a system-service. It even seems quite possible to remove it by force, though I don't know how deep it attaches itself to the registry. A format might be required.

I would start off by deleting the C-Dilla files themselves though, then going through the registry, first of all removing the C-Dilla system-service entry, but also doing text-string searches to ensure it didn't hide somewhere else.

Hopefully, although this is of course completly theory, C-Dilla would be removed, or at least sufficiently crippled, to allow installation of the MAX demo.

At any rate, I don't know if that'd work, but a format should though. I'm surprised and puzzled when you say it, infact, does not?.. plan C then, could be a low-level format wiping every single sector of the drive.. I couldn't survive that.

[Mahlon]

When I say a prior version of max was detected, I mean that the cdilla license, or some part of it, was detected and max could not be installed in 30 day trial mode -- it saw it as already there on the system and wanted to re-authorize in order to use. The sole point of my installing max in trial mode was to test CS4 which would only run in trial mode while max 5 is in trial mode as well.

We discussed this a bit on the discreet forum and Maneswar Cheemalapati was the first to give me the idea that it 'might' be somehow written to the bios, though as he said, he had only heard as a rumor. I'd like to know the answer, too.

I'm going to be writing discreet and asking about it.

Mahlon

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.