Suggestions for uncopyable Rare game disc?

[winds]

Hey guys,
Okay I recently purchased some pretty rare game betas from someone. They are betas of Suikoden III. One of them is infact a debug version of the game, which is worth quite a hefty sum, and could be the only known copy of this that still exists outside of Konami HQ. Now when I received it, it had quite a few scratches on it. Nothing too deep though, just tons and tons of minor scratches. It works perfectly in my ps2 as far as I can tell. Seeing that it is quite rare, I wanted to make a backup copy of it, but my PC absolutely refuses to read it. I'm hoping some of you guys have some suggestions or know of ways to make this thing copyable.
I have tried this disc in 3 different PC's and 2 different mac's. Both of the mac's when I try to make an image of the disc, they get about 30% of the way through then the drive starts making a horrible loud sound and then suddenly freezes. My PC I tried using programs such as Nero, ImgBurn, IsoBuster, and I believe MagicIso. The one that gets the closest to completing a backup image from the disc is Nero at 73%. I tried about 10 times and that is the absolute furthest it will get before getting read errors.
After all this I decided the scratches were just too many and got it resurfaced at my local blockbuster. They "seemed" to do a god job, the back of the disc looks almost brand new again. But still the same things happen when trying to make a backup of it, 73% is still the furthest it will get.
Lastly I tried copying the files one by one from the disc over to my HDD and then just creating an image from those files. All the files copied over succesfully except for 3 files, the opening movie, and 2 pretty large data files. I then checked the original retail game of Suikoden 3 to see if those files were the same size so I could just use those instead. The opening movie is the same size, but the 2 data files are off by just a few kilobytes. I tried it anyway and then tried to burn a copy of those files thinking maybe i'd luck in and it would work, sadly it doesn't get passed the Playstation 2 logo screen before freezing.

Now, does anyone else have any suggestions? Considering Suikoden is my absolute favourite series, I am a huge collector of the series, and this is a 1 of a kind and cool item, I don't feel comfortable having this be the only copy of it. Especially since the disc is 8 years old now and I could possibly lose the data forever one day.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Here are some screenshots if anyone wants to see how it looks:

[MrPopo]

So back in the day I used to use BlindWrite for my disc copying needs, as it did a very good job of being able to handle discs with interesting protection methods, such as intentional bad sectors. It would be able to handle the bad sectors and replicate them when it burned a new disc. You might want to give it a try.

[lisalover1]

Yeah, there are several programs made especially for recovering data from damaged discs. After a brief search, I found this program: http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=29

[winds]

Sweet thanks for the tips guys! BlindWrite sounds promising as I have a sneaking suspicion there could be some intentional bad sectors on this thing. I just find it weird that after the resurfacing it still gets errors at around the same sector. Plus given the nature of the disc and where it came from, I should think it's quite possible.
I'll test these programs out and let ya know!

[CRTGAMER]

Maybe Hold up disc to light. Any scratches through label?

[17DaysOlderThanNES]

how good of a job did blockbuster do? are there still any noticeable scratches or just the slight "swirl" from being buffed? Did they use the sanding pads? I don't know if i I would trust that to some yokels at Blockbuster, but at least they didn't make it any worse. I used to use one back when I did console repair at Play N Trade (for my own games), for best results, sand for the minimum time (10 seconds?) with the coarse sanding pad, minimum time with the fine sanding time, then 2 minutes with the #2, then 2 minutes with the #1 (or perhaps even 4 and 4). Resurfacing games is very much an art and if it's just some high school kids at a Blockbuster, they probably don't know or care what they're doing (just about every employee at my Play N Trade would manage to screw up the resurfacer all the time from just general apathy).

[elvis]

On Linux I use "dd" and "dd_rescue" tools to do bit-for-bit copies of devices (hard disks, optical disks, whatever).

In particular, dd_rescue has a number of features for getting past bad sectors that are worth looking at. I've used it in the past for things like imaging faulty drives and discs, as well as ripping DVDs with intentional bad sectors as copy protection mechanisms.

[winds]

@CRTGAMER
I just tried it but nothing, no light shines through. However there is one of those cd-sticker things on there just saying that it's from Konami, the date, and that it's a preview build of Suikoden III. So that could be preventing light from shining through.

@17DaysOlderThanNES
Yeah I was reading a little bit about disc resurfacing before I went to blockbuster. From peoples posts online I read that the automatic machines were a fair bit better than the manual machines. When I called blockbuster I made sure they were using the automatic machines, which they were. The guy who did it was the manager and I would say in his early 40s and it seemed like he knew what he was doing. I asked him how often doing this helps to fix the problem and he said in his experience 99% of the time. After the resurfacing there is almost no scratches at all. It looks brand new except there is 1 or 2 very minor scratches, I doubt they would be the culprit but I really don't know.


I just tried BlindWrite and it seems like an awesome program. It was giving me Log updates as it was reading the disc. It got about 50% of the way through but then suddenly it claimed one sector had a "possible gap" which sounds to me like a fake bad sector? Not sure though. It tried to read the sector for about 30 minutes but it wasn't moving so I cancelled the read. I want to try it again later tonight though, give my burner a chance to cool down.


Edit: @elvis
That sounds really promising actually. However I am using windows 7 and don't have access to Linux. Do you know if that program works on windows based systems?

[Hatta]

Use a live linux image. If you only have one optical drive, it's fairly easy to put on a USB key with Unetbootin.

[MrPopo]

I just tried BlindWrite and it seems like an awesome program. It was giving me Log updates as it was reading the disc. It got about 50% of the way through but then suddenly it claimed one sector had a "possible gap" which sounds to me like a fake bad sector? Not sure though. It tried to read the sector for about 30 minutes but it wasn't moving so I cancelled the read. I want to try it again later tonight though, give my burner a chance to cool down.

Yeah, that sounds like some of the stuff I used to run into. I'd never had it hang for quite so long, but bad sectors will cause it to take longer. Remember that the data is contained on a foil layer, then the laser reads it through the plastic of the disc. The point of resurfacing is to attempt to correct scratches in the plastic that refract the laser beam and prevent a good read. If the data on the foil is damaged (intentionally or otherwise) resurfacing won't do anything.

Edit: @elvis
That sounds really promising actually. However I am using windows 7 and don't have access to Linux. Do you know if that program works on windows based systems?

You might be able to use Cygwin to run it, though I don't know how well Cygwin would support a disc read application like that.