I'm currently working my way through my games installing most of them to test them with Wine, but some of them are in a severely damaged state so I've been trying to back up some of the discs onto my machine but I'm currently unsure as the best way to go about this. With Windows I could use Alcohol 120% and it's pretty much guaranteed that they will still work (with copy protection) if I mount the image afterwards with either Deamon Tools or Alcohol itself.

Now I'm wondering about the best way of going about trying to make identical copies of discs with Linux. I could try using "dd" but that goes mental if the disc uses any copy protection that consists of errors. I tried "cdrdao" and that kinda seems to work, but I don't know if I saves the errors and it creates TOC files rather than CUE files. I tried another thing too (which had a -clone option) but that tended to freak out on certain discs too (damned if I can remember what it was).

So yeah, what is the best way of making images of my discs for archival purposes? (i.e. as exact to the originals as possible).

Thanks.

Try Ghost for Linux google.

If Ghost for Linux does not work, use a device to clean up the scratches. Then use CD/DVD skins to protect the disc from scratches.