does anyone know where i can find information about how to handle an installshield 6 package? i need information about how to work on the product-serial protection. if someone did installshield before, or know where to find information about it, please help me, thx.

i forgot to mention, i passed the anti-sice tricks, so i only need help on the serial now.

thanks

The first thing you need to do is to determine if the serial protection is in the InstallShield script or if it is in some dll called by the installer. Run the installer and while it is running look for a newly created directory in your %TEMP% directory (C:\windows\temp for 9x or C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Temp\ for NT/2k). See if there are any non-InstallShield dlls in the directory and look through them for anything suspicious (you can find IS dll's by looking at version info in properties) Find something interesting and you probably can just look at that dll rather than messing around with InstallShield itself.
If you don't find anything however, don't worry. It just means that the serial is probably in the script file. The script file will be setup.ins or setup.inx Use isd from h**p://nekosuki.virtualave.net/isd.zip Then use the search in your favorite text editor to find the error message you get (if any) and look through the dead listing to reverse your serial protection.

If you have any other questions/problems, just let us know

Regards,
Kythen

I don't suppose there are any tutorials around for the reversing of an inx file?

Natzgul's InstallShield script cracking tutorial would be the closest that I can think of. If you mean the reverse engineering of the .inx files in the decompiling sense, i'd say look at the source code of isdcc (old IS decompiler). If you mean reverse engineering the dead listing made by the isd decompiler, that is no different than reverse engineering a messy C source file

Unfortunately, I can understand his tut, (can't get wisedec working on win2k, though) but the setup.inx file I have just confuses the hell out of me....I do not know where to start.. or even how to recompile it.

Ok, np. First thing is that wisdec can't handle .inx files... only older .ins files from InstallShield v5.x or earlier (afaik). Second, after decompiling the .inx file with ISD, open the resulting text file in your favorite editor and look for an error message or some other message that you can work from. After that, look through and see what leads to that good boy or bad boy message and try to reverse engineer the serial algorithm. You don't actually recompile the script at all. This is probably easier to do than patch the .inx file imo, as there isn't much documentation on inx files, opcodes, etc. If you can't find any message, try looking in your temp directory for any suspicious dll's that the InstallShield script may call. If the serial protection is in a dll, just crack it like you would any other program.

Just search in this forum section.
I asked such questions long time ago. A Japanese guy wrtites a decompiler for *.INX file. I have tried it and it really works.

cheers. thanks for the replies.....I shall delve back into it