this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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There is (or at least used to be) a debug command to write-protect a hard drive. No idea what it's for or why such a thing exists, but you flip a certain bit from 0 to 1 and drive no write. I won $100 once at work with this knowledge. We had a training course about how much better the new version of windows at the time was and how much harder it was to break - so hard they'd pay $100 (in early 2000s money) to anyone who could unrecoverably break their demo windows install during the 10 minute presentation. The instructor (who worked for Microsoft) said he'd been doing this for 6 months and they'd never had to pay out that prize before, much less 30 seconds in.
Sounds like something registry editor related.
No, this was via debug, a command that's been included in MS-DOS since like version 2.0 (before there even was a Windows, much less full-OS windows like Win95/NT/etc rather than 3.0/3.1 that were just fancy launchers that sat on top of DOS.) It can let you view and alter the contents of memory at a particular address, etc. We also used it to wipe hard drives by forcibly writing 0s to every block on the drive.
You could do stuff like that with the older DOS versions of Norton Utilities. I used to do fun stuff like set my friend's files as the drive label. He thought I was basically a wizard.
Yup, or any hex editor that could target memory addresses (some of them were limited to run on a certain file or whatever.) But yeah I used to do similar when I was a kid, I would go into my game files (all DOS games back then of course) and change text strings you could find in there with a hex editor. I'd just change goofy stuff like 'Copyright' to 'Copyleft', 'The bandit strikes the princess!' to 'The dude slaps a ho', etc. It was endlessly amusing when I was that age. :)