Re: PFS copy protection

[dalloff@freenet.columbus.oh.us (Dave Althoff)]

J. L. Walters (bird@MCS.COM) wrote:
: I picked up a complete set of PFS manuals, disk and backup disk at a
: sale. Recently I tried to boot a disk. Al went well for a time and
: then the screen turned to trash and my disk drive continued to run
: forever.

Which PFS: program was this?  If it was the old version of PFS:Write
(which shipped with a backup copy and was labeled "For the Apple IIe"),
then you may have stumbled upon a known bug.  At unpredictable times, or
almost always when attenpting to delete text which is highlighted (i.e.
boldface or underlined), the program will crash.  In this crash, the
screen turns to garbage, and the disk drive starts running.  I don't think
anything gets written to the disk, just that the motor starts up.  I had a
lot of trouble with that when we first got our //e (many many years ago). 
We complained about it to Software Publishing (kinda hard to do these
days...) and they sent us an update, which included a "Time to make a
backup copy!" routine on the master, which was labeled "For the Apple IIe
and IIc".  Incidentally, if you copy one of those disks (using a bit
copier), the copy will boot up into the "Make a copy!!" routine.  The
program insists that the disk NOT be write-proteced to make the copy, then
INSISTS that you write-protect the disk once the copy is made.

: Being really smart I tried the same thing with the backup
: disk. Naturally the same thing happened.

When you re-booted either disk after the garbage problem, how far did you
get before you had more trouble?  Perhaps you merely re-created the bug again.

: Looking over the battlefield I suddenly realized that I have three
: position switches on my 5.25" drives that allow me to simulate:

: 1. Never write protected
: 2. Always write protected
: 3. Look at the notch.

: As you might have guessed, the switch was in the "Never write
: protection" position, which as I remember allowd PFS to write garbage
: to the disk to destroying it since their disk had no notch so a disk
: with a notch was "obviously" a pirate copy and subject to destruction.

I wouldn't expect PFS: disks to have a feature that did this, especially
not the later versions with the built-in backup maker.  Not certain, though...

: My question, is thare a way to fix these disks?

That is, assuming that you trashed them...

Also, for those of you who have the DuoDisk drives and have not clipped
those two capacitors from the logic board:  The PFS: series (Pascal
version) copy protection is one of those that would trigger the "start
writing garbage on the disk without warning" hardware bug of the DuoDisk.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.
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