I gave a talk a few years back, comparing both retro and modern copy protection schemes. Also designed hardware for dumping floppies at the bitcell level (ZoomFloppy) and co-designed the Blu-ray content protection system.
http://www.slideshare.net/rootlabs/copy-protection-wars-anal...
Now my day job (SourceDNA) is building tools to reverse lots of code at scale. A never-ending stream of apps provides a ton of "wat?" moments as you never expect developers to make the choices they do.
Can you give an example?
https://sourcedna.com/blog/20150806/predicting-app-crashes-o...
And all that only to get access to MD5 or AES...
At one computer camp I was at, someone had hacked a bit copy program that managed to look like you were playing Pong in the foreground. (Otherwise the counselors would look over your shoulder and bust you.)
I also successfully managed to pirate an original Chaos Strikes Back disks by repeatedly copying the data with a (pirated) synchronisation dongle and the Cyclone software. It required several attempts to get the fuzzy sectors correct because I was using a pre-used disk. This technique and the recommendation to use completely blank disks would have been mentioned in the manual of Cyclone but I wasn't aware of it... Since I'd also pirated the software! I was also unaware of the fuzzy bits themselves, so it was just a bit of luck.
Anyway, CSB wasn't as exciting experience as its predecessor. Boring maze-like transforming levels, hard monsters (in the sense that they took a lot of time, not skill to eradicate), little of anything new, etc. Disappointing after all that effort ;)
Reminds me of another piece of modern software still in use by a lot of people, which pulls disk metadata from an internet database for similar purposes.
Copy protections access the drive in much the same way as a regular RWTS, even those protections based on physical features (e.g. spirals). I'm not aware of any copy protection based on fast and wide movements of the reading head. Copy protections read nibbles normally, they just process these nibbles differently from regular disks.
The noises you remember are most likely from the boot sequence which reset the head 100 tracks or so (so much more than needed) and as a consequence, that head would butt against some internal mechanism.
I've never quite understood why it did that myself. Regular disks have 35 tracks so moving the head 36 tracks should have been enough to reset.
Of course none of this helped by how loud the drive was just seeking.
It sounded like a train.
