Quote:
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they already released the new SECRET StarForce 3.xx that seems will be killing the "backup" industry...
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This must be the 'Starforce 4 SE' I mentionned 4 posts ago.
Although some have managed to making working images, and even working backups without emulation needed (!), the situation as a whole does look gloomy.
This version of Starforce seems to work at a very
low, almost hardware level since it can tell the difference between real and virtual drives - the @$гд&%# bastards...
Which means that even today's best CD emulators are not as stealthy as they should be: I hope we won't have to wait too long before the "backup" empire strikes back
However, the 2 CDs I wuz dealing with were NOT Starforce. After having completed the second dump (took about as long as the 1st CD) I downloaded the latest version of ClonyX (2.0.1.5) which recognized the CDs as...Ring Protech!!!
So this must be an even newer version.
They must have devised a new type of C2 read errors that gives readers an even harder time grrr...
Good news is, the burnt backups work, without any emulation needed.
Bad news is, I'm not sure how to make any 1:1 backups of such CDs in a much shorter time. Indeed I tried making another image of CD1 using CloneCD's 'Intelligent Bad Sector Scan' option, default settings (100 sectors step). True, the dump was completed quite quickly (A little over 10 mins) but when running Nero CDspeed's surface scan on the mounted image, it showed me (slightly) more read errors than on the original CD! Which meant the second image, unlike the 1st which took several hours to make, was NOT identical to the original CD-ROM.
So apparently, the only way to copy new Ring Protech CDs is the hard way, unless I can find a CD-reader that has VERY FAST error skip (and still does EFM encoding correctly)...