The USB 'trick' means burning the image to cd-r(w) with RMPS emulation enabled in Alcohol 120%, disabling all IDE cd-/dvd-rom drives of your system and then using an external USB cd-/dvd-rom drive + Alcohol or Daemon Tools to do the RMPS emulation. Actually this appears to be the only solution for backing up the latest Starforce protection (atm).
Maybe you could upload your .MDS file to some service like
www.rapidshare.de and post the link here, so other forum members (who weren't lucky enough to get a proper .MDS

) can try your one as well...
regards,
buggles