Adding to earlier concerns about TurboTax using digital rights management is the icing on the cake: the program gains unauthorized access to sectors of your hard disk outside the operating system to write special licensing data.

Clearly, the data in Sector 33 is a special “signature” that SafeCast uses to decide whether a program installation is legitimate. If you copy TurboTax to another hard drive , or restore to a new drive from a backup, this signature will not be included. And without that signature, SafeCast may deny you access to the software even if you’ve legally purchased and registered it.

Reserved Sectors Can Be Unsafe: Unfortunately, these “reserved” sectors of the hard drive aren’t necessarily a safe place for data. And they’re an especially dicey place to keep licensing information. According to Frank Van Gilluwe — whose company, V Communications, publishes System Commander and Partition Commander — viruses have been known to hide in this portion of the disk.

Data compression utilities, “multiboot” utilities, password protection and encryption software, and sector translation software (which allows older computer systems to accept today’s huge hard drives) may also reside in this area. Sometimes these applications can interfere with each other, in effect fighting for use of the space. extremetech.com