Backing up PS2 DVDs with large areas of deliberate bad sectors

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Backing up PS2 DVDs with large areas of deliberate bad sectors

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Ikari_San

Junior Member

3. March 2005 @ 07:34

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Hi, I'm a first time poster here, but I've been reading the forums for a few months :D

I'm just wondering if anyone knows of a proper way to back up my original PS2 DVD's which have large amounts of deliberate bad sectors on them? I have trawled for hours trying to find a solution but can't find a way of doing it.

I'm using a SCPH-39002 (forgot which version this is, but its the one before the new slim version) with ApplePro mod, burner is a Pioneer DVR-108, using Verbatim 8x DVD-R's (Singapore) discs. So far I have encountered only a couple of discs which have the mass amounts of bad sectors type protection on them:

1. PAL "GTA Vice City" (Platinum version). Extracted image using Alcohol 120 until errors were read near the end of the disc for about 20min straight, burnt image (about 98% size of original game disc), works flawlessly on the ps2.

2. PAL "Energy Airforce". Encountered bad sectors about half way through reading in the image. Through trial and error using BlindWrite 5 + BW5 Tweaker to specify amounts of sectors to skip, it turned out to be a chunk of 100,000 bad sectors in the middle, which I set tweaker to ignore, and the backup works flawlessly.

Now I have "The Bouncer" which has at least 1000 bad sectors on it (40% through reading the image the bad sectors start). Is there any tool or utility that will scan a DVD and report exactly which groups of sectors are bad so that I can set BW5 to ignore these sectors and successfully extract an image? If the extracting/burning utility (eg. Alcohol, Decrypter, BW etc, I've tried them all) would automatically advance sector skip upon reading an error this would be a definite solution. Alcohol 120 has an option for this but for some reason it doesnt skip ahead the specified amount of sectors, it just keeps reading them one by one. Setting BW5's profile to "bad sectors" or BW5Tweaker's "read subchannel data" options has no effect, it just hits the errors and keeps reading them one by one, which would take literally days of reading to get through them all, and probably burn out the drive.

Even a utility which would let me enter in a sector number and read that sector to report if it's bad or not would work, because I could make a note of where the chunk (they are usually in a big chunk) of bad sectors starts and ends and set BW5 to ignore them.

Thanks for reading this

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dragulaAC

Senior Member

3. March 2005 @ 08:59

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I backed up my NTSC version of GTA: Vice City without any problems. I don't think there are any ps2 games with bad sectors purposely in them. I've never encountered one before anyway. Are your discs scratched up pretty good or something maybe?

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~drags

Ikari_San

Junior Member

3. March 2005 @ 19:49

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Yes, the originals work fine, eg San Andreas, which I read perfectly with DVD Decrypter. Platinum re-releases tend to have more copy protection on them, I've found.

The game discs are not dirty, I have had a few CD games as well with deliberate bad sectors on them , it seems like an obvious way of stopping people from dumping the disc image.

What's more disturbing is there is no information on the net anywhere about how to overcome this! It seems very simple to me - just skip over the bad sectors at a fast rate until you get readable ones again. Why is there no software that does this? Alcohol and BW5 claim to do it but they don't , they just sit there slowly reading error afer error.

The only way I can copy games with this type of protection is to manually inspect groups of sectors on the disc and get an idea of where the chunk of bad sectors is and get the image extractor to skip the chunk.

If anyone's interested in backing up their PAL version of The Bouncer, skip sectors 880304-935000 and your image should extract perfectly. Just did this with BW5Tweaker and it works, but I'm yet to test it on the ps2. The bad sectors are also "surrounded" by roughly 30000 "empty" sectors so the game data remains unaffected and the image file is the same size. Energy Airforce had a similar thing and worked.

Edit: just remembered, PAL Platinum Vice City also has bad sectors in the autoplay which craps your drive when you put the disc in your PC, so it requires avoiding the autoplay (eg. loading DVD Decrypter then inserting the disc). So I'm sure it's not just a bad disc but a method of copy protection. I'm just surprised nobody has ever mentioned it here. Taito seem to use it a lot, both Energy Airforce and Tokyo Road Race had them. Rockstar have used it in Smuggler's Run and obviously Vice City Platinum. I would assume their platinum versions of other games might also have it. Or maybe it's something that Sony DADC offers to developers when their game goes platinum?

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This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 3. March 2005 @ 21:16

Ikari_San

Junior Member

4. March 2005 @ 18:48

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Just burnt The Bouncer with those bad sectors skipped and the game works flawlessly.

Hasn't anyone encountered this type of copy protection? I think SecuROM puts about 10,000 bad sectors at the start of the disc as part of its scheme, and I've seen a couple of posts at the Alcohol 120 forum from people who cant read discs with heaps of bad sectors (not PS2 games though), so why isn't there any info about this type of protection anywhere on the net?

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dragulaAC

Senior Member

5. March 2005 @ 14:23

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oh, well you're in a ps2 forum right now, and ps2 games do not have this problem. You should probably look around for a pc games backup forum. That would get you more help.

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~drags

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