Partition Wizard home on Server 2008 SP2 x64

[lars]

Hi,

I’m trying to get Partition Wizard Home to work on Server 2008 SP2 x64. It’s free for the client OS. The Server version (which is fuctionally identical to the client one) costs a ridiculous amount of money for “yet another partition manager”. I don’t have any need for it other than that I like it’s capability to recover accidentally deleted partitions in no time. I have never accidientally deleted a partition in the past, maybe that’s why I worry about it happening some time in the near future. It’s been almost 20 years since I last did anything with assembly and that was on 8/16 bit architectures as well so basically I’m a noob.

To get it installed on Server 2008 I used Stukan’s trick to temporarily load the client OS’s tokens.dat file and key. After upgrading them
back to Server 2008’s, PW Home simply prints a message stating that it doesn’t support Server 2008. I know it does though, I tested it with the client key and tokens loaded. Getting rid of the “doesn’t support Server 2008” message is relatively easy. In IDA it looks like this: at 0x00415409 the program calls what appears to be a function that returns its result in EAX; 0:not a server OS, non-zero:server OS:

0x00415409:
call _IsWindowsServer@0 ; IsWindowsServer()
test eax,eax
jz /* do something usefull */
/* print “gimme money” message and exit */

I suppose the simplest way to circumvent this is just replacing the function call (5 bytes) with code put a zero in eax:

0x00415409:
xor eax,eax
nop
nop
nop
test eax,eax
jz /* do something usefull */
/* print “gimme money” message and exit */

With a hex editor you can search for

E8 FA F8 07 00

and replace that with

33 C0 90 90 90

This does get rid of the “gimme money” message. PW starts normally and you can start the partition recovery wizard. However, once it’s found recoverable partitions and you try to start the actual recovery, the PW GUI disappeers from the screen. No error message, no event log entry, nada.

The same happens if you select, for example, a partition in the GUI. All it takes is a mouse click and … poof. All I’ve been able to find is that the program’s certificate is invalid in Server 2008. I haven’t got the vaguest idea what that means.

My question is: has anyone here experienced this kind of application behaviour before while patching ? Does anyone know what can be done about or know of a method to find out what’s causing the GUI to disappear without leaving some kind of trace ?

TIA, Lars

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