Concerning Rise of Nations Gold Edition.....
The Smarte scheme as outlined on the CD Freaks Offlne Help Guide 1 does not work with either Alcohol 120% or the lated CloneCD version. Is anyone else having the same difficulty? Again, this is with Rise of Nations Gold Edition.
Thanks!!

Welcome to the forum.

Did you check which protection is used?

Scan your CD with A-Ray and check what kind of protection it has.
Some games have different protections in different countries.

Btw, you can download A-Ray here.

Why doesn't it work?

When using Alcohol 120%, you should just select the SafeDisc 2/3 profile when copying Smarte.

Smarte

I used A-Ray to determine Smarte being the scheme.

Thanks for the help!! Rise of Nations Gold Edition uses Smarte, as reported by A-Ray. While trying to copy these CD's with Alcohol 120% and CloneCD, the reading process halts. The CD reader activity light appears to be hauling ass and the computer HDD activity light is on solid. The progress bar in Alcohol 120% sits at 0.4% at block 1104 (2.2 MB). Eventually, a disc read errror is reported at block 112. The Elapsed time counter continues to run until the reading operation is cancelled. I used the the CD Freaks Offlne Help Guide 1 to build the Smarte profiles in Alcohol 120% and CloneCD exactly as stated.

Thanks all!!

BTW... Using a Samsung CDRW/DVD SM-352B(1:0)

Smarte has natural errors *similar* to SafeDisc 2/3/4.

Yes but these errors seem much more aggressive then when i dealt with them when making the Smarte tut. Possibly this is an advanced version. Can you have any other drives to try to read from? If could possibly be the reader having a stroke when coming to this sector error.

BTW, what release is this game? Australian, American, French etc.?

Appreciate the feedback and suggestions, mate. This is the U.S. version. I just bought it a week ago. Will try reading it on 2 other burners and will post the results...have had no problem so far with the Samsung unit.

Standard SafeDisc profile (not 2/3) is enough for Smarte protection.
It uses no weak sectors.
For a more accurate read I select SafeDisc profile and untick fast error skip and just leave selected skip reading errors.
This does take a little longer but has worked no problems for me.

KitnaIsntHappy is absolutely correct (and is a genius too!). His post should be the accepted answer. Standard SafeDisc mode without fast error skip works 100% perfectly.
Thanks for the post!!

You're welcome

I was able to make a mini-image of Rise of nations Gold Edition by using Alcohol 120%. I selected the SafeDisc 2/3 profile and cancelled the read operation when the image was about 26MB. It mounted fine on Daemon Tools and played fine.

Basically, I had to use trial-and-error to figure out how much of an image I needed. The exact size is somewhere between 20MB and 26MB. Good luck.

How long did you play with this title? Smarte bombs out mid-way through a game when it detects a dud copy.

My friend has been playing it and there has been no bombing out so far. I'm beginning to suspect that that was just an empty threat from Smarte.

That seems about right...either empty threat or a threat not threatening to us RAW burners

I still don't understand why they switched from SafeDisc to Smarte, but that's been discussed to death.

Costs methinks.

Hmm, thinking about it Billy must be down to his last 20 billion now .

using Alcohol you should have the following Safedisc 2/3 result when reading :-

10:47:08 Processor info: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2100+ (1741MHz)
10:47:08 Disc dumping: (F MATSHITA DVD-ROM SR-8588(1:1)
10:47:08 Reading Mode: RAW Mode , Fast skip error blocks
10:47:09 Source Info: Session: 1, Track: 1, Length: 571.1 MB / 064:59:01
10:47:09 Writing image file: D:\disc images\RONGOLD1_dvd.mdf
10:47:19 Disc read error at: 1112
10:47:22 Disc read error at: 1113
10:47:24 Disc read error at: 1114
10:47:27 Disc read error at: 1115
10:47:30 Disc read error at: 1116
10:47:32 Disc read error at: 1117
10:47:34 Disc read error at: 1118
10:47:36 Disc read error at: 1119
10:47:39 Disc read error at: 1120
10:47:40 Disc read error at: 1121
10:47:42 Disc read error at: 1122
10:47:43 Disc read error at: 1123
10:59:17 D:\disc images\RONGOLD1_dvd.mds: Image file writing completed!
10:59:17 Disc dumping completed!

Interestingly CDCheck shows a CRC error on the original (and backup) in the file 00002.tmp

Not really.
I can't see how it would be possible to return the crc of an unreadable sector.
If it can't be read (hence the name) why would you expect it to return a valid crc?