IDA "Corrupt" Databases

[Eleven]

They watermark a bunch of registration details including some values associated with the registration username/details which aren't made public to even the registered user. Unless you know where to look and what the values are it won't be easy to modify the database to work with newer versions.

However, with a few later releases of IDA there have been corrupt-database patches that allow it to load any database that has been blacklisted, so your best bet would be to search for that.

One follow up question. If I do patch the current version, load a "corrupt" database from a previous version and then save it, which set of watermarks are in the database? Does IDA update the database with the current version information, or does it leave the old watermarks? The only reason that I ask is that I simply want to upgrade the old databases to work with an unpatched version of IDA. It makes it easier to migrate and work on multiple computers.

xtx

[infern0]

You can just pacth idag.exe and ida.wll (unpack them before). There are blacklist check near the message "database is corrupt". You can see MD5 hash calculation and comparison with an build-in list of MD5 hashes of stolen keys. Just patch this routine to return al=0 and you can open all "corrupted" DB. I work with patched version 4.7 about 2 month - all seems to be ok.