Copy Protection was Re: Defining Disk Image Dump Standard

Oh God. The Atari 8-bit was probably king of disk copy protection and the means to break/duplicate that protection. There were long sectors, short sectors , fuzzy sectors, long tracks, short tracks, error sectors, holes in the disk burned by a laser, phantom sectors, crc error sectors, and only HE knows how many others. Some sectors gave different errors at different times, some only appeared at certain times. It was an unbelievably complex, babylon back then. There were hardware mods such as the Happy and the Archiver chipset replacements which would duplicate these difficult disks, software such as the 'black patch' which would remove the protection by patching the maker's code. It was a bloody war. I guess we won for about ten years but protection is back on cd's and we are expected to be willing to buy crippled cd writers which will obey the protection marks. Yea right. Hey Bob Puff! Are you listening? I bet you can come up with a circuit to defeat the code embedded in these drives if anyone can. Directly in answer to the below quote, I have run into software on hard disk that could not be moved from it's spot, or 'ghosted' to another drive. I think this hard drive-based protection scheme went out when operating systems no longer allowed primitive disk access (OS/2, Unix, Windos NT, etcetera). John Wilson wrote: