dd fails with I/O error when trying to create .iso

[jcdenton1995]

Hello all!

Obligatory I am not a pirate!

I'm trying to create an .iso image of an old game cd but when I run 'dd' the cd drive sounds like it's dying a miserable death and then the copy fails...

dd if=/dev/sr0 of=game.iso bs=2048

The game is Freelancer if anyone is wondering, and it is mine, I paid about £5 for it on eBay. The thing is my PC doesn't have a disk drive but my old laptop does, so I'm trying to get an .iso going so I can transfer it to my PC and play it. Could it be that the disk is write protected? or is it an error on my part?

I have another old game disk that copies fine using dd, so I'm guessing it's not the laptops CD drive, although it's not conclusive.

Any advice is appreciated

[dinkidonk]

The CD may have some sort of copy protection preventing it from being read like you want to. Another thing is that you have set "game.iso" to be created in the working directory which may be in a write protected area. I'd suggest to use a more restrictive path, like "~/game.iso" or whatever.

[SeijiSensei]

When does the copy fail? Right away or later? Could it be a disk space problem? What is the actual error message you receive?

[Impavidus]

When you create the .iso, you only read the optical disk, not write it. And it's meant to be read, or it would be useless. Copy protection works when the optical disk drive has an anti-feature to recognise the copy-protect code and refuses to burn if that's present.

It sounds like a low-level read error. If the disk drive is OK, it's probably the disk. Maybe cleaning the disk helps.

[The Cog]

Many old games CDs had deliberately introduced errors on the disk so that they could not be copied in the normal way. I think the games would often check that certain sectors were unreadable with I/O errors before they would play. Reproducing disks with I/O errors is very difficult. It sounds to me as though you have one of those.

[QIII]

If you are going to use dd for this, I would try something similar to the following and specify the destination

dd if=/dev/sr0 of=/path_to/destination_dir bs=2048

[1fallen]

Just my 2 cents, If there are read errors while reading the source, "conv=sync,noerror" is necessary to prevent dd from stopping on error and performing a dump.

[jcdenton1995]

The CD may have some sort of copy protection preventing it from being read like you want to. Another thing is that you have set "game.iso" to be created in the working directory which may be in a write protected area. I'd suggest to use a more restrictive path, like "~/game.iso" or whatever.

Sorry my bad, when I wrote "of=game.iso" what I actually meant was "/path/to/game.iso" but your right, a good point.

When does the copy fail? Right away or later? Could it be a disk space problem? What is the actual error message you receive?

It fails immediately, the drive spins up and then drops to a really low rpm while making erratic drive noises. I don't think it's a disk space problem as the laptop only has a minimal ubuntu 20.04 install and very little else, and from memory it's got a 512 GB drive. The actual output from 'dd' is below...

dd: error reading '/dev/sr0': Input/output error
844+0 records in
844+0 records out
1728512 bytes (1.7 MB, 1.6 MiB) copied, 25.3084 s, 68.3 kB/s

...pretty vauge, I looked through the info page to see if there is a way to get more detailed debug information but I can't see anything.

Just my 2 cents, If there are read errors while reading the source, "conv=sync,noerror" is necessary to prevent dd from stopping on error and performing a dump.

I tried this after you suggested it, and while the process does continue, the drive still makes the same crazy noises mentioned above, and it writes around 50 KiB/s. Even if I left it for a very long time I think the resulting file would be junk :/

[TheFu]

This would be where I used ddrescue instead of dd.

Sometimes ebay purchases aren't the best. I've bought some used games from local used game/cd/dvd stores and about 1:20 doesn't work. That's the chance we take. I'll keep doing it too. The risk-reward is acceptable to me.

[jcdenton1995]

The thing is the game plays fine on a windows machine, just wont let me copy the disk, the same with a copy of Max Payne 1 that I have, plays fine but dd fails immediately. The impression I'm getting from reading these replies is that it's not totally common for that to happen and it may be some reason other than copy protection...