CD Copying

Music: King Harvest - Dancing in the Moonlight

So last night I tried to make a backup of a game I got, and the game uses the Safedisc 4.6 copy-protection mechanism. What this means is that the disc produces read errors through block 10,XXX at varying intervals. And it's trivial to rip it with an old CD drive, but the newer ones hang up pretty consistently every time one of these read errors are encountered.

In the end, after you get the right software you can make the copy, but it took me 45 minutes to copy one disc. The first 10k blocks took about 43 minutes, and then the rest of the disc (over 90% of the data) took about 2.

At this point I have working images of the discs, but I'm pretty confident that anything I burn will not work correctly, until I figure out how to recreate those read errors.

It's a real hassle, and it's contrary to the idea of fair use. I hate it. I'm now in the market for an older CD drive that will skip the errors more quickly so it doesn't take forever.

In the end, it took me about 4 hours to figure out the exact issue I was having, and how to get around it. Now I can have the pleasure of getting rid of all the things I installed that were going down the wrong path. I hate having useless software installed.