CloneCD Guide - Page 1

Authors: John, Nic

History

Elaborate Bytes was founded in the year 1986 by Oliver Kastl. They are specialists for Amiga mass-storage products, system, driver and embedded systems programming. Commercial "software only" products were CacheCDFS and the very successful IDE-fix. So, CloneCD is the first Elaborate Bytes' product which is not for the Amiga series of computers. You can download latest version of CloneCD here (all languages). Its price is $49 for US customers.

Overall

CloneCD is a powerful CD replicator software that will allow you to make PERFECT BACKUPS of most current protected CDs. This can be performed because it writes in Raw Mode, which allows it to have total control on the written data. So we are going to see what makes CloneCD so powerful towards all other usual CD-R software for now.

A lot of protections have been created in order to prevent professional piracy by mass replication. Nowadays, most famous protections essentially used are: SafeDisc (from c-dilla), SecuROM (from Sony), LaserLock, regarding PC world, and LibCrypt (from Sony) regarding Console world (essentially found on playstation CD for now). This makes the job more difficult when trying to make a safety backup of such CD.

You must have in mind that you have the right to make a safety backup as long as you own the original and as lots of people may have noticed : CD can be easily be scratched because of different causes (kids playing, temperature...)...) and consequently may not work correctly , so backup is the only way to make sure CD can be played forever :)

First we will see the way theses protections work and how to recognize each protection , then theses protections will be tested with CloneCD and finally you will find a FAQ where most of questions you are wondering will be there. If you already know how work these protections and how to see detect it on CD, you can go to part II which deals with tests :-)