I've got DVD1 of suse 9.3 but it's badly scratched but mylaptop is allowing me to copy it to my hard drive in a folder without any errors yet. Once thats done what do I have to do?

I have a DVDR Double layer DVD, but what do I burn it as, do I just copy it over, or is this some iso thing or what?

If it is an iso file you can just burn it as an iso image in a DVD. Don't you need a double layer DVD for the job.

Yup, my new laptop came with a dual layer burner, I copied over everything from the suse 9.3 DVD1 (took me 3 or 5 times to get it to copy over wihout a read error from the scratches on it) to my laptops hard drive, converted it all to an .iso file then burned the image of the .iso I had created onto a dual layer dvd. Works great. I went out and bought some of those dskins to protect it from happening again. Saved me $100.00 or the hassle of trying to find all the programs that are on the DVD but not the CD's.

Now I just have to do an upgrade to the 64bit version one of these days.

I have Suse 9.3 which I installed from a DVD. It is faster in the installation process than the 5 CDs. However Suse has since moved to 10.0 and now 10.1. The 10.0 is quite nice but I haven't even started to find a place Suse 10.1 yet.

My Suse 9.3 was installed in 2 computers before and is in its 3rd home still from the original installation. One of the most robust distros around I would say.

I am so use to suse 9.3 that I installed 10.0 or 10.1 but things have been moved around and I felt uncomfortable so I went back to what I've been learning on, maybe one day if I can find the retail package of 10.x in a local retail store I may give it another shot.

But you can leave the Suse 9.3, 10 & 10.1 in the PC, each between 5 to 10Gb depending on how you use them. Then you can boot to any one that take your fancy. You should be able to navigate yourself with the experience of one distro into any other Linux, BSD or Solaris.