Don't forget to see if your writer supports safedisc 2, check
this handy list. If your writer isn't mentioned, you can always try and see what happens, but I wouldn't recommend it. What you CAN do, is do like me and make images of all discs and backup the images themselves. I made images on my hard disk of all expansion packs + the original, up to and including Vacation. Then I compressed this with winrar 3.0, and I used a 700Mb volume size, so I got 4 files of 700Mb each and a smaller one, and I just wrote those files on the cds. Now everytime I want to install the sims I first have to decompress those image files and mount them with daemon tools, but the upside is that I don't need any cracks and I can use any patches, plus I finally have a backup.