TurboTax DRM Writes to Your Boot Sector?!

ltwally writes "As reported on Slashdot (amongst other sites) recently, the latest version of TurboTax is laden with DRM software. Even worse, however, is that it apparently writes to your hard drive's boot-sector , as reported at Extreme Tech here. As I'm sure most Slashdotters already know, the boot-sector is often times used for silly things like boot-loaders and such. "

Re:How Appropriate

[Scaba]

Virii write to boot sector

Viruses [reference.com], not virii.

CDilla

[Epsillon]

CDilla's LMS does this too, although I'm not completely convinced it's the bootsector. Still, nothing short of a low level format clears it, so it probably is.

No.

[cperciva]

This software does NOT write to your boot sector. It writes to sector 33 on the track which contiains the boot sector.

This is certainly a Bad Thing, but not nearly as bad as writing to the boot sector would be.

Just file your taxes electronically for free

[macemoneta]

Here [irs.gov] is the intro page at the IRS, where you can select a tax preparer that will let you file and submit electronically for free. Check the criteria for qualification; most people qualify.

If you insist on using TurboTax, use their web-based vesion; it's alway current and no software gets installed on your PC.

Personally, even though I've been using TurboTax for over 10 years, I will be using a different tax preparerer this year. I find their association with this kind of DRM crap distastful.

Re:Um...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and the Mac version has no "DRM" at all.

~jeff

Administrator

[yerricde]

As I understand it, a program running as Administrator on NT can elevate its privileges to LocalSystem and do just about anything, such as write sectors to physical drives.

Re:VMWare?

[phillymjs]

I vaguely remember reading on a Mac site that the TurboTax packaging rather explicitly states that the product will not run in any kind of Windows emulator (the article of course was talking about Connectix Virtual PC).

If that's the case, this boot-sector thing might be a major part of the reason why.

~Philly

Re:Linux interop?

[Red Warrior]

.. any word on how it impacts a dual-boot box? So far, so good. I've got TT installed in WIN98. I run a triple-boot WIN98/RH8.0/Mandrake9.0, using RedHat's Grub. Works fine, boots fine.
Intuit's still a bunch of SOBs for doing such a dangerous thing, though.

If you have to use Turbo Tax....

[sven7]

Use their Web service instead of installing their software...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:CDilla

[Ldir]

They are the same thing. TurboTax uses the Macrovision C-Dilla (Safecast) license manager. It is covertly installed when you install TurboTax. It is not removed when you remove TurboTax, however. Intuit now offers a C-Dilla uninstaller on their web site.

I'm one of the legions of long-time TurboTax users who switched to TaxCut this year. Glad I did, TaxCut works just as well, costs half as much, and has no DRM or other installation games. As a bonus, it imports TurboTax data flawlessly.

We went through this before, in the early days of the PC (early 80's). Companies kept using more and more obnoxious forms of copy protection, making software more brittle, and more and more difficult to install and use. Finally enough consumers revolted and the software companies wised up. Looks like Intuit needs a history lesson.

Don't know about you, but it's TOO complicated

[MickLinux]

My wife does our taxes. We have an LLC, really a microbusiness that does less than $30k/yr [this year it'll be $25k]. From that you knock off expenses, ebay fraud [paypal, please take a bow], and the like.

Anyhow, just doing minimum compliance with the law, no massively complicated deductions, you have to do things like calculate "minimum alternative taxes", and such... it's taken my wife since December, 2 hours or so each day, about 3 days a week... so I guess that would be 36 hours so far. She's still not done.

Yeah, she's doing it analog. I don't think turbo tax *would* help a whole lot, especially since a major part of her job is reading and rereading all the IRS documents to find out their new rules this year, and how she has to expense this, deduct that, cannot expense and *must* deduct t'other, *must* expense the third, or fill in a form explaining why she isn't expensing it, and so on and so forth.

I dunno. If you count the cost of her time as $20/hour, then without us owing anything, the cost of taxes would be $720 and counting.

Anyhow, lemme finish up with a link and a comment:

http://www.givemeliberty.org : absolutely right, legally correct based on written law, but it'd be incredibly stupid to join. Lots of our rules have nothing to do with law, if you get my drift. Better just to leave.

Re:only in danger if you dual-boot

[ejdmoo]

Check out this [turbotaxsupport.com] on the turbo tax support site.

Re:Heh, silly me.

[Bert64]

Infact, only an os installer should write to the boot sector, anything else should be considered a virus. Infact many bioses have the option to detect and block attempts to write to the bootsector under the name of bootsector virus protection.

Re:only in danger if you dual-boot

[SecretAsianMan]

only modifies sector 33 of your boot-sector

Huh? A sector on a disk does not contain other sectors. Therefore, there cannot be a sector 33 of the boot sector.

Perhaps you mean that that sector 33 in the boot-information track or cylinder is overwritten. That would seem to make more sense.

Re:VMWare?

[reynolds_john]

I would bet the farm on the fact you could do it with VMWare. I have found that OSes installed on VMware have no knowledge of their host operating systems, nor does any disk activity from the VMware OS have any affect on the host's partitions/drives, because the 'disk' is actually just a file.

Re:Heh, silly me.

[numbski]

Because the mac version was $10 more AND none of the rebates in store would apply.

Well ok, it doesn't write to the boot sector, but

[kfg]

it writes to the boot *track,* so it's not going to munge your partition table, but may well munge other important boot records.

Nothing belongs in that *track* other than boot information. Period.

KFG

As has been pointed out. . .

[kfg]

like, by the article and stuff, it doesn't write to the MBR. It writes to sector 33 of the boot *track.*

The problem is that since the entire track is reserved for boot information, not just the sector holding your MBR, things like LILO and GRUB may be residing there as well.

Boot loaders are legitimate boot records. Software registration codes are not. They don't belong in the boot track, whether they write to the MBR or not.

KFG

Re:VMWare?

[unix_hacker]

Win4Lin recently added support for TurboTax. It virtualizes writes to cylinder 0 into a special file in your home directory. So you can safely run TurboTax without it actually doing anything dangerous to your hard drive.

Re:VMWare?

[youngsd]

Yep, it works with VMware. That's how I installed it, after reading the earlier /. story. One thing, though, you need to turn off the "hardware acceleration" in the VM configuration while starting the program (after that, you can turn acceleration back on).

After reading the earlier stories about locking to a particular machine, and possibly installing spyware, I figured I'd either return the thing or install it under VMware. The geek in me won out, so I decided to see how it'd work under VMware. I'm sure glad I didn't install it on a PC directly.

-Steve

Here's the response I received from them

[Safety Cap]

Thank you for sharing your concerns about TurboTax. Feedback from customers like you is the best way for us to know exactly what you're experiencing so we can work together to get you correct information and the best solution.

I am sorry that it took us so long to respond to your e-mail. You expressed concern about how product activation will impede your ability to access your tax files in future years.

• If you reinstall TurboTax after October 15, 2003, you will not need to purchase a new product license. TurboTax 2002 products that currently require product activation will be activated free of charge, thus allowing anyone to install TurboTax on any computer without needing to purchase a product license. (Example: You activate TurboTax on your home computer and complete your taxes in March of 2003. The following December, you install TurboTax on a new computer. Because you installed TurboTax after October 15, you will not need to purchase a product license.)
• If you purchase a new computer or a new hard disk for your current computer, Intuit technical support agents can assist you in reinstalling and reactivating TurboTax at no additional cost.
• If you reformat your hard disk or replace your current operating system, in most cases reactivation will take place without you needing to contact Intuit.
• If you reinstall the same version of TurboTax on the same computer that it was previously activated on, you do not need to purchase a new product license.
• If you install TurboTax on another computer before October 16, 2003, you need to purchase a new product license only if you want to print from within TurboTax, electronically file, or save your tax return as a .pdf file from that computer.

I hope this information answers your questions. If you would like to get more information about product activation, please see the Product Activation page at http://www.turbotaxsupport.com/default.asp?platfor m=1&docid=815 [turbotaxsupport.com].

You are a valued customer and your opinion matters. If I can answer any additional concerns that you may have, please let me know.

Sincerely,

AnnabelG
Tax Development, TurboTax

Re:As has been pointed out. . .

[Flakeloaf]

For one untrained in the ways of the boot track, how might I go about removing it? I've played with the MBR and such, and even had a virus infect my boot record before, but what's the proper method for removing this thing? Assembly? ;)

Sector editor. I prefer BreakPoint's Hex Workshop [bpsoft.com]. Be sure you know exactly wtf you're doing though, or you could be in for a mighty long evening.

By the same token, anyone with access to a sector editor can mimic TurboTax's copy protection and install it on pretty much any PC at will.

Re:Does the HAL prohibit going around the FS?

[arkanes]

The defragger runs as a native NT application, not a win32 application - it needs this because it needs to be able to run before the win32 layer is loaded up. You don't need to do that kind of thing to write to the boot track, you just need Admin privledges. Details on the difference between the NT API and the win32 wrapper API for it can be found at Sysinternals.com. You can do some nifty stuff with an NT-native application, like writing Registry entries that can only be removed or modified by other NT applications, and not by anything running in the win32 layer.

Re:Administrator

[quantum bit]

I'm not sure about this. NT uses a Hardware Abstraction Layer which should prevent any direct access to any hardware. In order to write a defragmenter for NT, Diskeeper had to write a kernel extension which would give them low level access to the disk.

No, the HAL does not prevent direct writes to the disk. An administrator can open the raw disk device ("\\.\PhysicalDrive0" -- the NT equivalent of BSD's /dev/ad0c or Linux's /dev/hda0) and read / write anything.

I suspect the reason that a defragmenter would need special kernel support is that the file system driver keeps internal state data and would react, um, badly to the data on the disk changing out from under it. Think blue screen and possibly corrupt filesystem.

However, for areas that aren't directly touched by the FS driver, such as the MBR, unallocated partitions, or partitions for which there is no filesystem driver loaded, like UFS or ext2, this method of access works just fine. A while back I wrote a quick utility to let me tell the FreeBSD bootloader (which lives in the MBR) which partition I want it to default to loading on the next boot. Real handy for accessing dual-boot systems remotely.

Re:win4lin and vmware

[karlm]

If you're not running vmware from a privledged account and haven't given an unprivledged account write access to the raw device, vmware will have insufficient permissions to do such a write. This is why you don't run things as root. Maybe someday MS will have the default account not have Admin privledges. Oh well.

Contact their PR dept.

[pyros]

I just sent this to [e-mail], if other people do the same, InTuit will get the message that the upsets customers. No garauntee they will stop, but at least they'll no it upsets us.

"I'm a potential customer for TurboTax software. A recent discussion held at the Slashdot forum indicates that TurboTax is laden with DRM (Digital Rights Management) components, and even goes so far as to write to the boot sector of the hard drive. I wanted to know how InTuit responds to this. I can't support a company who would include such measures in their software. I understand the need to prevent piracy, but writing to the boot sector is something that only disk partitioning software and operating system installers should do. I'm eager to hear InTuits response on this matter, as it will be the deciding factor in whether I buy InTuit software.

Here are some links to the sites I am obtaining information from.

Original article claiming the action:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,397 3,881243, 00.asp

Pursuant discussion on Slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/02/16/1 549232.shtm l?tid=185

PS - I'm posting a copy of this to the Slashdot forum, and intend to forward the reply to Slashdot as well."

Right of first sale?

[VersedM]

The technical reasons (such as making physical writes to the hard drive, etc) for not using this product are compelling, but I believe the legal and social reasons for avoiding it are even more compelling.

"Digital rights management" in this form essentially strips me of the right of first sale (the doctrine that makes it legal for video stores to rent out videos that they have purchased or for you to resell a book once you are done reading it). Once I purchase this software I should be free to do whatever I darn well please with it, *and* once I'm done with it, I should be free to sell it, give it away, or whatever I wish as long as I don't keep a copy for myself. By preventing any of these actions, "DRM" tramples on consumers' rights and should be resisted any without technical flaws that could render your computer unbootable.

I sure am glad I have procrastinated in doing my taxes... Looks like I'll be checking out Intuit's competition this year.

Re:I just bought that yesterday!

[Richardsonke1]

I took a look at the EULA for Turbotax:

Intuit does not warrant that the Software or Services are secure, free from bugs, viruses, interruption, errors, or other program limitations. Some states do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so the above exclusions may not apply to you. In that event, any implied warranties are limited in duration to 60 days from the date of purchase of the Software. However, some states do not allow limitations on how long an implied warranty lasts, so the above limitation may not apply to you. This warranty gives you specific legal rights, and you may have other rights that vary from state to state.

In other words, by installing this software, they could legally plant a virus (not including DRM viruses) and you would have to repercussions. Even worse, they could put a trojan on your computer and watch how you spend your money, etc and sell it to advertising companies.

Even worse:

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, INTUIT AND ITS REPRESENTATIVES ARE NOT LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF BUSINESS, LOSS, CORRUPTION OR THEFT OF DATA, LOSS OF PROFITS OR INVESTMENT, OR THE LIKE), WHETHER BASED ON BREACH OF CONTRACT, BREACH OF WARRANTY, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), PRODUCT LIABILITY OR OTHERWISE, EVEN IF INTUIT OR ITS REPRESENTATIVES HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES AND EVEN IF A REMEDY SET FORTH HEREIN IS FOUND TO HAVE FAILED OF ITS ESSENTIAL PURPOSE. IN NO EVENT DOES INTUIT ASSUME ANY LIABILITY TO ANY PARTY OTHER THAN YOU ARISING OUT OF YOUR USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE SOFTWARE OR SERVICES.

In otherwords, no, you can't sue them. They can do whatever the heck they want to your computer and it is not their responsibility to fix it. That's the *cough* beaty of EULAs...

I filed a "product suggestion" and got a reply

[Anonymous Coward]

I filed a "product suggestion" at http://altserv.intuit.com/orien/turbotax_enhance.c gi [intuit.com] (saying that I'd used TurboTax for several years but would not use it this year because of the DRM issues). I got the following reply:

Thank you for contacting Intuit Inc.

We received your e-mail concerning TurboTax(R) Product Activation. Product Activation is designed to help reduce unlicensed use of TurboTax software. It ties a single copy (a license is tied to a pc, not a copy of the software) of TurboTax to a single PC. Product Activation is completely anonymous; no personal data is collected or transmitted to Intuit. Product activation does not prevent TurboTax customers from preparing tax returns for themselves and their family members or from giving the CD to someone else who can then purchase their own product license. TurboTax customers can prepare their return from more than one computer but will only be able to activate, print or e-file their tax return from a single PC.

However, you may install the trial version on other computer and work on your returns but you can Efile and print from the computer where you have first installed the program.

Product activation helps to ensure TurboTax customers use the product in accordance with the license agreement. The key terms of the License Agreement have been the same for the past several years. It restricts the licensed use of TurboTax software to a single computer. With product activation your privacy is safe. We do not transmit any personally identifiable information about you or your computer.

Product activation transfers nothing but a Product Key and Request Code. The code and key are matched together and a confirmation is sent to Intuit which enables TurboTax to be activated on your computer. Product activation does not monitor any activities on your computer such as what Web sites you visit, etc. It will not prevent you from using your CD-R or CD-RW drives.

You can still prepare multiple returns from your computer and prepare your return using multiple computers at no additional cost. You can remove/delete Macrovision SafeCast (C-Dilla) folders and components associated with TurboTax.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you. We hope new arrangements will not affect our business relationship in any way but will continue to grow. We have forwarded your comments to the TurboTax Management and Development Teams for consideration. Although we cannot guarantee that your feedback will result in a change to our guidelines, we assure you that we take all advice seriously because it contributes to the improvement of our products and services, and we appreciate your honesty.

To obtain additional information about product activation, please visit us at http://www.turbotaxsupport.com/default.asp?platfor m=1&docid=815 [turbotaxsupport.com].

Further, Intuit respects and protects customer information. We integrate privacy in to everything we do. That is why privacy and security were key considerations when implementing the product activation technology in federal TurboTax for Windows desktop products for Tax Year 2002.

The Macrovision SAFECAST(R) product activation technology used by Intuit installs files on your computer when you install TurboTax. These files serve as your product license; in addition, they also manage and protect that license. These files interact only with TurboTax and with each other. Macrovision SAFECAST does not gather any personally identifiable information. It does not examine, modify, or gather information about your computer, your computer's contents, or your activities or behavior, nor does it transmit any such information to Intuit, Macrovision, or any other party.

C-Dilla is a company that was acquired by Macrovision in 1999. Some of the Macrovision SAFECAST technology used in TurboTax is derived from earlier C-Dilla products. "Spyware" is jargon for hidden programs that transmit user information to others (usually advertisers) without the user's knowledge. C-Dilla is not spyware.

If you have additional questions, please visit us at www.turbotaxsupport.com. We appreciate your interest and look forward to serving you in the future.

There is a new uninstaller for Macrovision Safecast/c-dilla. This requires that you first complete your taxes, uninstall TurboTax normally, and follow the process located here. http://www.turbotaxsupport.com/default.asp?platfor m=1&docid=836 [turbotaxsupport.com]

If you need further assistance, or if there is any other way we may be of service, please contact us at http://www.intuit.com/service.

Respectfully,

Nidhi

Intuit Customer Service

Macrovision

[Eraser_]

Get This.

TurboTax also broke my DX8.1 install. Turns out, those fancy movies that come with it are Macrovision encoded. NT user? check your Services for a magical new service (I can't remember the name, I've long since ripped it a new one) which even if you disable it, running turbotax fires it right back up to automatic. Lord this gives me a new reason to get a full refund from them. How can one tell if their bootsector has some extra bits in it?

Re:CDilla

[innocent_white_lamb]

Perhaps, but neither of those will work. MBR is the Master Boot Record, which occupies the first sector on the boot track, only. The boot track has 64 sectors in total, 63 of them are generally "ignored" by the os ad everything else. This turbotax thing writes to sector 33 on the boot track, not to the MBR which is also on the boot track but not right there.

My Logitech mouse drivers installed spyware

[OneInEveryCrowd]

A year ago I bought the then new Logitech dual pickup optical mouse and installed the drivers from the included CD. The install looked kind of suspicious so I ran ad-aware. It reported some kind of spyware components so I removed them. The system was clean before I installed the drivers.

This really blew my mind at the time. I can see someone who provides free software doing that using the excuse that they need to make money and pay the employees, etc. But spyware with a $49.99 USA mouse ! Jeez...............

Why not more OUTRAGE at SafeDisk?

[Nom du Keyboard]

If you read the Extreme Tech article completely, it reminds us that the companion product (not used in TurboTax yet) SafeDisk is even more insidious. That it replaces your CD-RW drivers with its own and monitors (prevents?) how you use your CD-RW drive after that. Now there is something that ought to be the target of lawsuits left & right.

A few lawsuits for system damage by SafeCast right now wouldn't hurt either.

So what is a good utility to inspect and clean all this crap off of boot sectors 1-63, even if it does make limited-time demos forget their earlier installs?

answer

[Ender Ryan]

Transgaming has purchased a number of copy prevention mechanisms for use in WineX to enable it to play windows games that use them. There's no way around it for them, it's either circumvent the copy prevention, or include code in winex to enforce it/allow the game to play. If they did the former, they would be in violation of the DMCA and would undoutably be sued into oblivion immediately.

So no, nothing more nefarious than making games work.

Possible alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't thank me, thank Google Sets. :)

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Tried leaving Feedback at Intuit.com

[Ath]

Of course, it doesn't work! So maybe someone at Inuit browses Slashdot. Ahahaha! Right! ---- Hi, I have just finished doing quite a bit of reading, both at Intuit.com and through other resources, about the copy protection method Intuit used on the recent version of TurboTax. While Intuit may be concerned about lost sales of TurboTax due to copying, I can cite at least one example of a lost sale due to this copy protection. Me. I had been purchasing and using TurboTax for 6 years but will do so no longer. As the copy protection Intuit used on TurboTax definitely DOES affect the use of my system by writing information in the boot sector area, I luckily have avoid the problem by not using the product. So whoever decided the use of the copy protection was a good idea should be held accountable, because I am sure sales will be detrimentally affected. And those numbers will be clear. As I am sure you are aware, most people do not bother writing to vendors to express displeasure about certain business practices. Hopefully, my note is merely one expression of a lot more silent ex-Intuit customers. Thank you. ----

Re:Well, if they're writing...

[mAIsE]

This is not a problem on my Mac.

Re:As has been pointed out. . .

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Back in the day, a "format /mbr" from a DOS disk would restore the MBR (not sure about the rest of the boot track). It doesn't do anything besides this, and it's safe with Win9x and probably Win2000 too.

However, if you're using lilo, this will wipe it out, so you'll need to boot from floppy and run lilo as root again to re-create the MBR.

Re:As has been pointed out. . .

[Sheetrock]

I wouldn't touch it. From the article, it sounds like it's dropping a key that is only of importance to Intuit and the TurboTax software. If it's on their system, the damage is already done to whatever previously inhabited sector 33 (probably nothing important). It won't execute by itself, and it's probably data and not executable code anyway -- you've got more to worry about whatever Intuit is dumping into the Windows install.

At best, you can wipe something that will be indecipherable to anybody but Intuit (and break the TurboTax installation in the process) -- at worst, you could inadvertently clean out your partition table. I'd recommend ignoring it, but if you don't mind flirting with disaster you might be able to use the same Norton tool they mentioned in the article.

Re:As has been pointed out. . .

[Jardine]

Not sure if format /mbr works, but fdisk /mbr definately works.

Re:This is *NOT* DRM

[frdmfghtr]

DRM stands for "digital rights management." It refers to systems for encoding, managing, or enforcing rights and clearances for digital media. It's not a general-purpose synonym for any copy-protection or piracy-prevention system.

By that definition, this is in fact DRM--the right to use the software in its entirety is encoded by the contents of sector 33; your right to use the software is managed by the exchange between your computer and the Intuit product activation servers; and the license is enforced by the aforementioned encoding and management.

The old copy protection measures "back in the day" may not have been called DRM, but that's exactly what they were--primitive and relatively unsophisticated techniques for managing your right to use the software IAW the license.

I installed it.

[Anonymous Coward]

It fucked up my f-prot installation.

On top of that, the one-click update just sat there, so I had to download the update program and run it manually. That farked up the turbotax installation entirely. It wouldn't even run anymore. It was in the task list, but nothing worked.

Uninstalled it and reinstalled it a few times, but it didn't help. Followed the instructions on the website completely, but no luck. I spent the entire day yesterday trying to get turbotax to work.

I *had* planned on getting my taxes done this weekend. That plan was shot to hell.

I uninstalled it, and took it back to Walmart today. They didn't give me a hassle over the fact that it had been opened. I was surprised but pleased about that, since the in2it web site refund page seems to require an order number.

I hope they ship it back rather than selling it to someone else, since the drm activation took place. That serial number won't work for anyone else now.

I will never purchase turbotax again. All this hassle for a stinking $20 one-use product. They might eliminate the 5-20% piracy that might have existed, but only at the cost of losing 60% of their sales.

Another VMWare detection mechanism

[gnuber]

The undocumented VMWare I/O port communication mechanism [tripod.co.jp] can also be (and is) used to determine whether an application is running under VMWare. The relatively simple code to implement this was posted [securityfocus.com] to the Honeypots security list.

Re:The IRS can't forgive you of not paying your ta

[fishbowl]

Pretty much everybody who has ever pressed the line of tax protest that you describe, has done time for it. I think it was irresponsible of you not to mention that detail.

If you already bought it ...

[gnuber]

I buy Turbo Tax "Premier Home & Business" every year, so I picked it up in early January when it hit the shelves. Fortunately, I have not yet risked my system by installing it -- I plan to try Tax Cut instead. But I certainly don't want Intuit keeping my $68 after this outrage! So I read the box, and noted this text on the lower-left back corner:

"60-Day Money-Back Guarantee: Try TurboTax software. If you're not satisfied, return it within 60 days of purchase with your dated receipt for a full refund."

So even those of you who already opened the box are covered! I recommend returning this nonsense at the first opportunity. If the salesman gives you any flack, just point them at this text on the box.

Re:How many other programs do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed Autocad 2000i on a computer a couple of years ago. Anyway, the user managed to completely screw up his computer in such a way that we had to reformat and reinstall Windows 2000 (even FDISK was used). When the OS was reinstalled we tried installing Autocad but the software informed us that our 30-day trial period had ended and we must contact Autodesk to register. So... where was the info written to?

Now, I for one doubt those claims (Partition Magic would surely be able to zap the software, and the software wouldn't run if Linux was installed etc) but if it is true then who knows what else could be written to inaccessible (by the user at least) parts of the hard-disk?

One way to get rid of copy protection like this is to first make a full file backup of your hard drive that you are going to modify.
Use a disk tool like drivepro to wipe the first 10 cylinders of the disk (this will completely destroy all data on your hard disk) you would then need to reinstall your os and restore your file backup (Do not allow it to write/overwrite any boot files or hidden files on your boot drive root directory, be aware that after the restore, running any program that writes to an area outside of the file system will probably re-install the copy protection data back to the sector.

*This is just personal opinion of how you could in theory, recover and reinstall a Copy Protected product and in no way should this opinion be taken as seriously or as fact. I also assume no responsibly for any damage, or legal action this interpretation of opinion may cause*