[arcane]

That's what some people have said, but I have been using that method for over a year now and have yet to damage my PS2. I think the secret is to be gentle and understand how the disc tray actually works.
I'm just afraid that if I burn an unpatched image to a DVD+r that it is not going to load it correctly. Its been my experience that there is another level of encryption after bypassing the initial loading encryption. I think its later in the code and that's why I've had to patch my images for CD based games to CDr.
I think (but I'm not sure) that the mod chips bypass all levels of encryption, but I'm not looking to mod my machine.
Thanks