I discovered this when I tried to reinstall trial software which had 1 month trial period. I was amazed. I did format /f (or whatever the switch was to force a real format) with the "Rescue Disk", made by Windows. I should have had a totally reformatted partition. I reinstalled Windows, and then the trial software. Lo-and-behold ..... the trial software said I had used up my 30 days. What? Where was it stored? I had to use an old Dos6 boot floppy to format it out, and since I use linux to zero it out. Then the trial software went in again. So the question is.... what else are they storing?

I remember googling around for what was going on and it was hinted that Windows will do something like mark certain disk sectors as bad, then hide information in them. It's formatting and delete programs will then skip those areas, leaving them to be found by the next install. Dos6 was the last version of any microsoft product which just did what you wanted. And of course, linux isn't bought off by the government spies yet, although I am becoming increasingly wary as big money moves into controlling the various linux distributions.

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh

In reply to Re^3: OT: in vivo sublimification of a windows machine by zentara
in thread OT: in vivo sublimification of a windows machine by R Pentomino

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