So I'm trying to save dvds here by asking because believe me I've wasted plenty... :/
If I do a burn that ends up with a 20% quality rating (gets DRE often...) and decide to do a copy of that backup with IMGburn or Alcohol 120% would that second copy give me the same quality rating of 20%?
Remember, not a second copy of the original game but a copy of the backup... I have maybe one or two games that have been consistently giving me DREs whereas some games like Animal Crossing have never given me one once...
I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean by "quality rating"?
The way that I understand what you have said, a 20% quality rating would be 1 bit error out of every 5.
This is DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY! 1's and 0's.
For Audio or video, 1 in 5 bit errors would produce something that is marginally usable, since video and audio can "make up" for missing corrupt data.
Data is something completely different. If it isn't a "100% copy", it may as well be a a 0% copy. As I link to say, on a data disc, "One bit error will ruin you day". (i.e. the disc will not work properly.)
This isn't video or audio, where missing/corrupted bits can be interpolated or in most cases, not even missed.
A "good" digital copy is supposed to be a 100% duplication of the original. Is there are errors in the source material, there will be errors in the copy. No way around it. You can't replace the missing/incorrect bits.
Ex. I did a backup of a game. There were 6 bit errors in the rip. It (and every subsequent burn, and copy of the burn all had the same error. My copies were 100% of the original (and they all "locked up" at the EXACTLY same place). I knew then that it wasn't my burns that were the problem, and I check my original rip with fc (file compare) and found the errors.
6 bit errors on a Wii disc is 100-(6/37599838208) percent correct. (something like 99.99999999984042484526639801439% correct if I did my math right). Result? bad disc.