"This isn't possible unless you're using a rewritable disc.
You could in theory write something in your windows registry and a monitoring piece of software that intercepts a particular cd rom with a particular file.
But don't. People will find a way to bypass your security and all your efforts would be wasted. Try to find a competitive price and a wonderful software instead of this approach."
"What stops an user from creating an ISO of the CD and making tons of copies before running anything even if somehow the setup program destroyed the CD?
The only way I can see this being possible is burning a specific identifier into each disc. When the setup program is ran, it communicates with a server somewhere. It sends the unique identifier and the server flags it as used. The server then returns a cryptographic key along with binary data that is necessary to run the setup. If someone tries to run the setup again off the same CD it will once again contact the server with the identifier and receive a response that it is flagged and no longer usable.
The problem with this is that the person installing it has to have an internet connection. Someone would probably crack it anyway and just have it skip the server check. Anytime you receive data and it is on your computer, there is a way to dump it for later use. Someone could disable the check and just inject the server response. You also have to run a verification server which would be expensive.
"Use a copy-protection similar to the one Codemasters use. Have some physical errors on the disc deliberately, even if anyone copies the disc the physical errors are not transferred and hence becomes an easily identifiable copied CD. Normally, reading programs ignore the physical errors, but in this case presence of physical errors would authenticate the CD.
As of destroying the CD upon use, coat the CD with some chemical which corrodes the surface when the chemical comes into contact with the Laser. But, of course, the corrosion should have a lag time which is enough for the drive to read the data (if the CD is authentic).
You could possibly do some research on this one. I don't personally know how to do this. You probably have enough room on the disk to have a program that will copy itself into memory, and force a write of 1s to the CD even though it's not blank anymore, and then force a write of 0s to the CD after all 1s has completed. It would probably require some driver programming, and wouldn't necessarily work on all computers depending on what type of driver it's using? (maybe? not sure about this). Tricky part would be to trick the computer into writing onto the disk when it's not empty. Even though it's not a rewritable, I think if you do it enough times, you should be able to corrupt the data.
