On Mon, 2005-08-08 at 11:06 +0800, Lloyd White wrote: > I am helping a newbie Mac user and have come up against a problem I have not > encountered before. He was given a couple of Chinese DVDs with different > zone codes and copied them to his hard disk and got a warning that he had > only 2 uses more and he would lose the use of his super drive. He is now > worried. > > Is this use of a different zone recorded somewhere or is it in the firmware?
It's in the firmware. > In other words can doing a clean re-install of the OS wipe out that record. No. > Or can we delve into the depths of the system and remove that record? Generally not, though it depends on the drive. What you *CAN* do, for some drives, is re-flash them with firmware that doesn't care about region codes. This isn't entirely safe, and you'd need to find firmware for the drive. There are also programs that run at the OS level that manage to make the drive overlook these issues. -- Craig Ringer
