The need to copy a protected disk can arise for any of us, even for those who are far from thinking about hacking and piracy. As you know, the surface of the disc is easily scratched and becomes unusable. One day, a disc that has cost a lot of money turns out to be unusable. A copy of this disc could easily make up for such a loss.
Instructions
Step 1
One of the most common disk copy protection systems is the StarForce system. The creators of the system guaranteed the game producers absolute copy protection, but with the right approach, the disc can still be copied. Let's consider an example of copying a protected disk using the Alcohol 120% program. This program can be easily found on the Internet and installed on your computer. Alcohol 120% will not only copy data from the disk, but also transfer information about its physical structure to a special file, which is read by the emulator during recording, which in turn will emulate delays that imitate StarForce protection.
Step 2
Insert the disc to be copied into your computer's floppy drive. Run the Image Wizard in the Alcohol 120% program. Do not forget to activate the "enable emulator" checkbox and select Starforce 1.x / 2.x as the data type. Click "Next". For a successful copy, the program will need to create a virtual image first. Give a name to the file to be created, select the *.mds format and point the program to the folder where it will write the disk image. Disable all unnecessary active applications, set the drive read speed to minimum. The more thoroughly Alcohol 120% reads the source disc, the more chances it will be able to cope with the protection. Depending on the power of the computer, after a while the creation of the virtual image will be completed, you can remove the disc from the drive.
Step 3
You can do different things with the recorded virtual image. The best solution would be to link the image to the virtual disk. The Alcohol 120% program, in fact, specializes in this. But you can try and burn it to a physical disk. When recording, Alcohol 120% reads the protection data from the information file and will try to completely recreate the physical copy of the disk you need. The write speed, as well as when reading, you need to select the minimum. After a while, your disk will be ready.
