How to backup protected CD's
Some game and music CD's are just hard to copy. The publishers make it that way to protect themselves, but cause the end user trouble. Luckily, I like trouble.
My kids lost Lego Star Wars II (what a great game!) before I made a backup. That teaches you a lesson. I figured I better backup the other popular games we have.
I'm focusing on microsoft game CD's. When trying to make a disc image of Age of Empires 2 the Conquerors Expansion, I got an error message:
There was a problem reading the disc you are trying to copy. Please make sure your disc is free of fingerprints, scratches, or dust then try again.
This was a lie, and happened with several other Microsoft titles. Truth is, the disc was fine. This was some low-level trick Microsoft uses to prevent disc copying. Clever! Since this must be part of the driver or some higher-level OS API for CD reading, I decided to eliminate the problem by eliminating the OS and using Linux (Ubuntu Feisty Fawn). Guess what? No more error and the image was copied just fine.
Another problem appeared, though- Ubuntu could not burn the image to disc. It said the image was invalid. Huh? I can't explain that one, but I have the workaround. I went back to windows and simply burned the image using Sonic Record Now and it worked fine. Ironically, this was the same software that reported the 'error' when trying to read the image in the first place.
I can't install linux to copy a CD! There is a slightly easier way- find a friend with a Mac. Or use Knoppix. Just run it from a CD- you can download a bootable image of it, which is very cool. Could probably even boot off a USB drive. http://www.knoppix.org/ You can take over any computer with Knoppix... but that's another story.
It must be a real bummer to be the guy that comes up with these 'security systems'. I hope they don't spend too much time on it.
This must be a junior programmer job.
