Big Buck Hunter Pro, Safari, Open Season, World reinstall fail

[lilshawn]

Had an interesting quirk pop up whilst reinstalling a Big Buck Safari machine drive image from the restore CD.

It appeared to begin to load normally. the software install part began where it begins the 30 second countdown (if you don't want to overwrite everything shut down now) before it starts the cloning procedure to give you time to reconsider and disarm the bomb.

immediately after the countdown, it began the clone program... then threw an error where it said the software licence for the cloning program was expired. (i'll get some shots of the error soon)

at first i thought there was an issue with the CDROM drive (the damn things never work right because they never get used) so i put a known good CDROM drive in there... same error.

i went into the BIOS and checked the date and time. January bla bla 2004. seems the clone program they use checks the date to see if the software is allowed to run.

fixed the date and installed perfectly. possibly having a date before the software was made threw the date check for a loop. but if anybody runs into this issue, it might be because the CMOS battery had died and the date was reset.

NOW...

it seems to me that sometime in the future the recovery DVDs supplied by Raw Thrills for the machines will no longer work. i haven't tried it out yet to see if there is a kill date. further testing is in order.

I hate when companies do this crap.