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Make ISO of Protected CD/DVD ?


bradleybrand
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bradleybrand

I have some old discs and want to make ISO backups for convivence but some are protected to prevent this. Is there anyway around this?

 

I have somewhat looked at the following:

  • ImgBurn
  • Daemon Tools
  • IsoBuster

 

Game example: Theme Park World.

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Hans_Henrik

Do you have Cygwin installed? if not, can you install it? https://cygwin.com/setup-x86_64.exe - also make sure to install "ddrescue" when it ask you what packages to install


start a Cygwin terminal "as administrator" (that's important!), and when the protected cd is _not_ inserted (and has not been for at least 10 seconds), what output do you get from
ls /dev
then insert the CD and wait 5 seconds, then run
ls /dev
again, what do you get this time? it should look something like
hans@DESKTOP-2LHJILI:~$ ls /dev
clipboard  conout   dsp  full    null  pty0    scd0  sda   sda2  sda4  sr0  stderr  stdout  urandom  zero
conin      console  fd   mqueue  ptmx  random  scd1  sda1  sda3  shm   sr1  stdin   tty     windows

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the CD Copy protection use unreadable sectors on the CD to prevent copying of the CDs. Normal CD copy programs will freeze or crash when they reach the unreadable sectors. 
GNU ddrescue will write null bytes on the unreadable sectors, and find the nearest readable byte, and continue copying from there. DDRescue should be able to copy copy-protected CDs (by replacing unreadable bytes with null bytes), try DDRescue.

However, DDRescue is only for unix-like systems, like Linux or MacOS. If you're on MacOS, sure run DDRescue directly, but if you're on Microsoft Windows, you'll need Cygwin or WSL or Virtual Box to run ddrescue. Cygwin is the easiest way to run DDRescue on Windows.

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I remember running into this problem, unfortunately I don't remember how I solved it, as it was years ago.
I had to switch to CloneCD for some of my games, don't remember why, but maybe it's related to the protection problem? There's a free trial version available, you can easily back up everything you have before it expires.

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