If the original CDs themselves work without issues then it means the drive can handle the media including the copy protection data correctly. The burning software must explicitly support them, as IIRC some copy protection mechanisms pretend as "bad sectors" to non-aware accesses so they may not be verifiable perhaps...

Media incompatibility does exist on some optical drives. I recently discovered one of my SATA BD/DVD writers apparently cannot read any type of RW media (CD-RW, DVD+/-RW, etc.). Can you first try burning something else that does not involve copy protections? If these stuffs can be burned and verified then your disc media is compatible. If not, either your optical drive is not compatible with the media used by the disc, or the disc has developed defects (which happened to a few of my CD-RW discs, and they could no longer be used at full capacity as a result).

The older versions of virtual cd software can't read quite a few types of copy protection, or even emulate the copy protection when the disc is mounted. Generally speaking I think you will have to create the discs using ISO and BN/CUE formats on a modern system and use fixed EXE files to remove the copy protection checks. You won't be able to get the more insidious copy protection schemes working if you want to do everything inside XP without modified game executables.

I tried it with 2 other CDs on my modern machine with an external optical drive and the same problem. I think it's the optical drive.
Could an older drive not have this problem?

Retronerd878 wrote on 2026-03-18, 15:45:

I tried it with 2 other CDs on my modern machine with an external optical drive and the same problem. I think it's the optical drive.
Could an older drive not have this problem?

As others have said, the "bad sector" type of optical disc copy protection requires more to read/create/play images of these games. There are multiple problems you need to solve.

In short, this is how it works:
1. A game master is created and duplicated with intentional bad sectors is specific locations.
2. Once the game is installed and run, the game executable tries to read one of the "bad" sectors.
3. If the optical drive returns a read error, the game execution proceeds. If the drive does not produce any error, it is assumed that the media is a copy because it lacks the bad sectors.

It sounds like your disc imaging creation software is choking on the "bad" sectors when reading. Most software does, regardless of using modern or vintage optical drives. In order to read (and write CD-R) leaving the bad sectors in place, both the optical drive and software needs to support raw modes. Even if you solved this and got a good read, you still have a remaining problem - the game executable is still going to look for drive error due the bad sectors, which it won't find. In other words, you'll still need a crack/patch to run without optical media.

I haven't messed with raw-reading for decades, but when I did have success with bit-perfect cloning, I was using a TDK VeloCD (rebadged Plextor) PATA CD-RW drive. (I don't recall the exact model #, but it was the 12x10x32)

Back in the day, some of the Plextor drives were used to make copies of discs like this along with Alcohol 120%, ClonyXXL and some other programs.

See these links for some helpful info:
Which software to preserve CDs?
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/back-up- … ed-cds.1067423/
https://gbatemp.net/threads/creating-backups- … ew-v4-8.618530/

I am quite fond of mitsumi drives... Quiet, generally reliable.. and the right vintage design imho.