PBM is very easy to register, simply purchase a license from us on our order page, and you will receive a license code. To enter your license information, simply boot the PBM Setup disk you used to install PBM and select Registration, then Register, and finally Enter new license. PBM stores the license on your PC's hard disk so you will not need to enter it again.

Will PBM work with my operating system?

We have a list of Operating System Installation Instructions in our online manual; however, PBM was designed to work with any operating system that uses the traditional partition table which should be ALL of them. Even if we do not list instructions for your operating system, it is very likely to work once you figure out how to install it properly. We are more than happy to test and provide installation instructions for any operating system you like if we can download an ISO CD-ROM image of it, or you send it to us for testing purposes.

What type of mice does it support?

It supports only PS/2 style mice. If your BIOS has PS/2 emulation for USB mice, your USB mouse may also work. It is unlikely that serial, non BIOS emulated USB, and other mice will work. In the event that you are using an unsupported mouse, all functions can be controlled by the keyboard.

Does it support BIOS disk translation software?

No, it does not. This is software like the OnTrack Disk Manager (and there are others) that installs itself in the MBR and loads code to access a larger drive than the BIOS is capable of. The problem with BIOS disk translation software is that it creates an incompatible environment for these reasons. (1) It remaps the drive so that the sectors are not in the correct places, LBA 0 is NOT LBA 0 on a drive with this software installed. (2) Booting any other way but from the hard drive results in not loading the disk translation software, which results in corrupted access to the drive. (3) It is prone to problems in which is becomes corrupted and the users entire drive becomes inaccessble. (4) It is NOT a compatible way to fix the issue, a newer BIOS is proper way to solve the issue.

What about programs like Drive Image that alter the MBR to perform their tasks?

PBM will handle this properly, but there is one word of caution.  Programs like Drive Image actually have a feature to them that allows the system to boot up and load a "virtual floppy disk".  This is a great feature and very handy to perform tasks that the program is unable to perform when running within the operating system.  What happens is that the MBR is replaced with one that loads the virtual floppy disk and then restores the correct MBR afterwards.  This will work with PBM just fine, unless a PBM Setup disk or CD-ROM is started when the system is rebooting to load the virtual floppy.  In this case, PBM Setup thinks that the unrecognized MBR is a new MBR associated with the currently booted operating system and assigns it.  The result is that when booting that operating system, it will keep booting the virtual floppy disk and NOT the operating system.  To fix this, simply go into the properties on the operating system and set it to use the standard MBR instead of the custom one.  If the operating system required a custom MBR that was overwritten, then you will need to restore the PBM configuration to recover the custom MBR.