I've looked into this further, apparantly the game uses jowood's Securom/Xprot V.3 ,similar to starforce it invades your sytem and disables deamon tools .dll file if you try using that as a back up.
I have had no success making a copy of the CD, used alcohol, nero..the works...hmmm used like 5 dc's to date!
(might as well buy another copy of the game and keep it still unwrapped
)
not sure how the original no-cd crack was done for the exe, perhaps someone could enlighten me?