Greetings everyone.
I’ve decided it was time to tackle on this DVD PC disc. What’s so special about this DVD? Well! It has a physical anti-copy protection!!!
I’ve bought this game in a newsstand, and it’s a release by FX Interactive with a proper case, an instruction manual and even a different setup. I don’t know much about FX Interactive but I think this would be helpful.
I’ve already tried to dump this disc at the beginning of my “Redump career”, but someone told me it was just too early. Now fast-forward until today, I think I’ve collected as much information as needed to determinate how we could dat this particular disc.
-- THE RING --
This anti-copy protection is commonly called “Ring” and it has intentional errors in the sectors inside it. As you can see in the picture, it has a 1mm darker ring about 2/3 of the disc. This could certainly be the well-known “Ring PROTECH” or “ProRing”
In this ring there are a bunch of dummy files that, of course, are not readable as the driver will make skipping noise when detecting the “ringed sectors”. The list of the dummy files is the following:
COLIN/FIRST.TTS
RALLY/ROUND.00_
ROUND/HIGHT.SII
ROUND/LOW.TX_
ROUND/ROUND.SXT
ROUND/SPEED.IXE
ROUND/WAY00.LKP
ROUND/WAYSPEED.XSE
ROUND/CAR/CAR00.LL_
ROUND/MCRAE/WHEEL.SIX
XSET/SET_UP.SID
XSET/VERNT.00_
XSET/XSETWIN.LL_
XSET/XPSETUP/VERW98.00_
XSET/XPSETUP/VERWIN00.00_
XSET/XPSETUP/VERXP00.00_
This site https://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/c … tech.shtml says that there are checks to see the files inside the ring. This doesn’t happen with this disc/game, there are no file checking at all. The protection, in this case, it’s only physical. I’ve managed to complete a dump and install the game with the iso, and it worked without a hitch!
-- DUMPING --
The “fun” part comes by dumping this game. I’ve tried 3 softwares: IsoBuster, Alcohol 120% and CloneCD 5.3.4.0. DICUI still doesn’t support error skipping in DVD discs, so I couldn’t use it.
IsoBuster and Alcohol 120% would took so much time, but CloneCD is the one that did the job!
CloneCD was set to use the default settings: 0 reading attempts and software error corrections.
For this disc, I’ve used 3 drives: a very old TEAC DV-516D, a HL-DT-ST DVDRAM and a Pioneer BD-RW BDR-209M with 1.52 FW.
The TEAC drive took the longer: clocking about 8 hours and 15 minutes!!!!! One dump made with this one.
The HL drive would take about 2 hours. Three dumps made with this one.
The Pioneer took a bit less than the HL. One dump made with this one.
The hashes were discordant between the complete dumps with different drives. Some would detected “more errors”.
The sector range of the ring is between LBA 1271968 to LBA 1295647. This was tested by using the sector viewer in IsoBuster with the HL and the Pioneer drive.
The 3rd LG dump could be the correct one when comparing the range of errors. All bad sectors were filled with 00 patterns. The way I did to ensure it was correct was to use the “extract from-to” option in IsoBuster by starting the extraction from LBA 0 to LBA 1271967 and from LBA 1295648 to the last sector using both HL and Pioneer drives and the 3rd HL dump iso, all the hashes matched.
With all this said and documented, I really hope that all my efforts aren't wasted because I felt like having to deal with disc sooner or later. So please, if I need to do some more testing before we can greenlight this dump, just tell me. I'm more than happy to try again if something is still not clear. 
https://imgur.com/a/rSDYqLi photos of the disc and the drives
