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The research center at my uni has an old Colinbus LABOFLEX-60/HF CNC that has been sitting for a while. A small team (of which I'm a part) has been put to work to get the machine up and running. We currently have an old PC (Pentium 4, DDR era, Windows XP), which has all the necessary software to convert Gerber files to the proprietary file (ColiLiner) to be later loaded by the software that communicates with the machine (ColiDrive).

The thing is that the machine is full of crap, and slowly dying (we had to change some capacitors here and there in order to make the machine boot). The idea would be to get all the program licences, and change the current PC for a "less old" one.

I've found all the installers, but only the license for the ColiLiner program is missing. In the (now dead) website, you can find all installers. There is also an activation guide where you can see that it requires the support center to send you back the activation license. I've tried to communicate with them via email, but the domain does not appear to exist anymore.

Looking at the original installation, I noticed that there were some interesting files that I thought could have the license. I tried installing the program on the new machine and pasting those files over, but had no success.

I would like to know if there is any way of getting the license out of the machine to be copied to the new one. I'm no expert at Windows, even less at XP, so I also don't really know where programs store "sensitive data". If copying the licence or program data is not an option, is it possible to bypass the program licence?

Ali Khakbaz
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1 Answers1

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Your ability to get this software running again depends on at least several factors, and likely some we do not know.

In no particular order, the factors already brought up and that I can think of are:

  • The software requires calls to a remote licensing support that is now offline.
  • The license scheme likely involving a hardware fingerprint that is checked each time to confirm you have not moved or copied the license to a new device.
  • Where the license is itself stored on the computer.

A hardware fingerprint, or "node lock", will prevent the software running on any other hardware, unless you know what hardware IDs the software is using for the fingerprint and spoof these exactly in the VM or new host hardware.

The licensing domain being offline means that you cannot get a new valid hardware ID in order to re-validate the license. The domain registration info was public and so should still exist somewhere, and you may be able to use this to find where the old publishers and owners are now who may be able to help you.

If you could find the actual license data stored on the computer you may be able to reverse engineer it, but this is a long shot.

I see two options that have the best chance of success:

  • Direct image of the entire OS and all software. This is definitely the easiest thing to try, but it will only succeed if there is no node-locking going on.
  • Find the old owners/publishers. Do some web sleuthing. Based on your description, it sounds as though the transaction was manual rather than some automated process in the software. The old owners may have some old master or test license files they could send you to help you out.
music2myear
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