I had several CD's that had been burned several years ago. When I tried to make copies of these disks I received error messages and no copies could be made directly. However when I tried ripping them to mp3 files directly, the music recorded OK. In this manner I was able to recover most or all of the music.

I would have ripped them as WAV files to preserve the quality as far as possible.

"OK" is subjective. I think the key factor here is that in a direct copy, the computer tries to make the copy at the speed you specify (e.g. 4×, 16×), warts and all. But when you rip a CD or do a copy through an image, speed is reduced in favour of error detection and correction.

use EAC in safe mode and accurate rip enabled ...the last version of EAC will compare your extracted audio files with albums from the accurate rip database and it can verify that your extracted data is correct

I agree with using EAC - I've managed to make copies of damaged CDs a few times with that piece of software.