On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 12:07:22PM -0400, Brian Rose wrote:
> 
> In the end, I am unable to back up my game CD. Fortunately, it only costs 
> about $10 now on the discount shelf, so this isn't a huge issue. It was 
> valuable as a learning process, however.

Well, it wouldn't be copy protection if it were _completely_ trivial
to copy the CD :) You're not going to be able to use any tools that
attempt to save the actual data of the CD, since there's no way of
flagging certain sectors as bad. As you mentioned, if you just replace
bad sectors with 0 bytes, they're not going to be bad sectors anymore
when you write them back to a CD.

Someone mentioned using cdrdao (sysutils/cdrdao in pkgsrc)... you
should try out the "readcd" utility from that package. It'll attempt
to read the CD in "raw" format (2352 bytes/sector instead of 2048) and
also save a separate "table of contents" file. Look into the -noerror
and -nocorr options, in particular. Then, there's still the question
of whether your CD-R drive will even write a CD with intentionally bad
sectors. You may just have to search for a patch for the game so it
doesn't bother doing the copy protection check.
-- 
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