How to be stupid and kill a system 246/256 hdd based game

[serantes]

Well
This is a nice story
crackstation lend me two games this week, Battle Gear 3 and Zoids Infinity, so i could reverse how those hdd based games do work, but this is not the topic of this post

So i first dumped zoids hdd under linux and this was the result :



To be honest, this is just what i was expecting, just a file list with offsets for the files at the beginning of the hdd.

Then, i dumped Battle Gear 3



And just saw this **** windows **** on the header of the disc (red mark)

Some bytes after the start, there is something nice aswell



Well for my conversations with crackstation, some guy from this forum should know who or what Gaetano is (my guess is that its the username of the windows computer where the hdd was plugged OR computername)

So i cloned Zoids image into another hdd and i decided to see what happens if you put it on a windows

Well guess what



YES, windows overwrites the header of the hdd if it dosent finds a valid filesystem table on it, but well, plug the hdd into a windows computer is not enought to destroy it, you have to initialize the disc.

So my friends, if you dont know what you are doing, dont plug arcade stuff to windows computers please.

This is really sad to destroy such rare game as Battle Gear 3 Tuned, just to see what the hdd contents are

If anyone has a Battle Gear 3 Tuned HDD and want to help me fixing this hdd, please contact me

Alex

[cools]

Ouch Windows does some "useful" things sometimes...

[uncletom]

One more reason to hate MS, if you already don't.

[penrhos]

Thats why I use Linux when recovering peoples data from thier drives as well.

[serantes]

Thats why I use Linux when recovering peoples data from thier drives as well.

yeah, dd is our best friend, but dd also has its risks, if you dont know what you are doing its one command and you destroy the drive
I only use windows for ofice really, got a virtual machine for it , and this cause i really hate open office (this is personal taste )

Alex

[d123456]

So i cloned Zoids image into another hdd and i decided to see what happens if you put it on a windows

YES, windows overwrites the header of the hdd if it dosent finds a valid filesystem table on it, but well, plug the hdd into a windows computer is not enought to destroy it, you have to initialize the disc.

wtf. What exactly means initialize in this context?
If you boot the computer and only if you try to manually read files from it?

You did still clone the drive on windows, right? This is insane, M$.
Is there a guide somewhere on how to clone HDD's?
If you'd clone a HDD from one BG3 machine, would that clone work in another BG3 machine, or would the dongles mismatch on that other machine? It could be that the dongles are matched to only one HDD and not work on another HDD.