as long as you can, better make a backup of your disc ;)

yeah defently

@Goldey
Glad to hear it all worked well. Now make sure you definately do what 'Eagle' suggested and back it up.
It does go to show that just because a disc is scratched it is not always lost. ;)

One word of advice that I, the paranoid person that I am, always do: whenever you make an image of a CD (any CD!), mount the image (Daemon Tools, Alcohol 120%, whatever) and do a recursive file compare between the CD and the mounted CD image. If 1) there are read errors on the CD image and 2) all files on the CD image are identical to those on the CD, then the CD image is - at least, on the file level - correct.

As for the copy protection, it may or may not be correct but - unless the installation is already copy protected, some very evil games do that! - you will be able to install/update/crack the game from the image, too. Good luck,