Cloned drive worked with 98% programs

[moderategamer]

So I cloned my HDD a few weeks ago and on first impressions everything seemed to work as expected all my files were there and the programs I tested launching all worked fine. However two weeks later I tried to boot UE4, Unity and Atom editor and all three no longer worked it's not a major problem as I simply need to download them again. It would seem that these programs have some sort of protection built in to combat cloning, when I booted Unity it said some id was not correct so I'm assuming the other programs were the same. The actual files for the program were still present in my c drive it just somehow knew that it was a copy. I thought I'd share my experience so that others planning on doing a drive clone can be aware of this before going ahead. Thank god all my settings were saved for these programs especially Atom as I have seriously modified the program with packages and I have not written down any of there names, lesson learned though I'll add it to my txt file with important info.

 

Anyone else had difficulties with a clone? It's seems strange to me that 3dsMax, Visual studio, word, substance painter etc all worked fine no issue. You would think that if the 3 programs I mentioned had protection then they would also.

[normpearii]

Some programs make a hardware ID at installation based off of the hardware present in the system as copy protection. Not all programs use this method.


Windows is probably the best example of this I can think of. Windows 10 will reactivate itself without manually adding the license at installation just by matching the hardware id from the previous activation. Came in handy when my laptop harddrive died and my recovery disks were missing.

[KrYpToCiD]

There is a catch . Unity want to prevent payed accounts cloning. They would lose a lot of money so they are using the license key to determine what you did with their software. it is working something like this: you have a hardware ID and in the same time you log in their server compare your public IP with your hardware ID submitted by log in. You can fool the Windows saying you have identical hardware ( ID, manufacture, parts, etc) as someone else but this is a red flag for them. When you log in with another HDD and everything is identical even your IP, you get flagged and stopped from log in. The same is when you cloned someones account and use it on your own PC, even if you try to cover your tracks, there can't be 2 identical PC even with same bar codes and again you get flagged.