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Author Topic: Megatouch Force 2004.5 Hard drive clone  (Read 1468 times)

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Driftek

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Megatouch Force 2004.5 Hard drive clone
« on: July 30, 2024, 05:48:53 pm »
I cloned the old IDE drive inside of my model: KOV-105-104 Merit mega touch to a SSD and used a converter with the jumper set to master to boot the drive using the IDE cable. I verified that the serial numbers match after the clone. It boots up, but it tells me that my key is invalid for the software. If I put the old IDE drive in then it makes it past the key check. Is the hardware key locked to a hard drive? What am I missing here?
« Last Edit: July 30, 2024, 06:38:41 pm by Driftek »

Megatouchmike

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Re: Megatouch Force 2004.5 Hard drive clone
« Reply #1 on: July 30, 2024, 10:32:48 pm »
The key isn't locked to a drive, but there is a hard drive model check in Force 2004.  The game reads the model from /proc/ide/ide0/hda/model, so it's easy to bypass.

Adding something like this in a boot script should do the trick:

Code: [Select]
echo MERIT0011 > /tmp/hd
mount -n -o bind /tmp/hd /proc/ide/ide0/hda/model
« Last Edit: July 30, 2024, 10:39:32 pm by Megatouchmike »

Driftek

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Re: Megatouch Force 2004.5 Hard drive clone
« Reply #2 on: July 31, 2024, 05:30:03 pm »
Thank you! I’ll give that a shot

Driftek

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Re: Megatouch Force 2004.5 Hard drive clone
« Reply #3 on: July 31, 2024, 06:10:18 pm »
The key isn't locked to a drive, but there is a hard drive model check in Force 2004.  The game reads the model from /proc/ide/ide0/hda/model, so it's easy to bypass.

Adding something like this in a boot script should do the trick:

Code: [Select]
echo MERIT0011 > /tmp/hd
mount -n -o bind /tmp/hd /proc/ide/ide0/hda/model

That did the trick! Thank you.

lilshawn

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Re: Megatouch Force 2004.5 Hard drive clone
« Reply #4 on: August 04, 2024, 02:32:02 pm »
the "merit0011" custom hard drive model check was removed beginning with the 2005 software year. the installer software will complain of a non-merit drive being installed (buy a merit drive for reliability and performance and whatnots message) but will still install after a short delay of displaying the message.