🚀 go-pugleaf

I have hardly any experience of commercial CD-based PC games, but 
decided to install a couple on a new computer I've just built for my 
daughter because I thought her kids might like them. This is where my 
puzzlement begins.

Although both games installed an enormous amount of material on the 
hard drive, and one even required me to enter a serial number, both of 
them seem to require that the original discs are in the drive before 
they will run, and I can't find any way to avoid this. Is this normal?

For fear that repeated handling by kids might damage these discs, I 
tried to make copies, but Nero reported read errors and gave up.

Even when the original discs are used, the machine takes a very long 
time to read them, accompanied by a lot of repetitive clicking noises 
like the ones you get when a CD drive is faulty. This makes me wonder 
if they are using an anti-copying strategy whereby the recordings are 
slightly non-standard but within the range of tolerances that they hope 
will allow them to be read on most normal drives. I've heard that 
Playstation discs are like this, hence the sale of little boxes to 
allow playing of backups made on a standard CD recorder.

The machine I used to try to make the copies is a different one from 
the one with the games, so two different CD drives are apparently 
struggling with these discs, though they both work just fine with 
anything else, and both games are by different publishers.

There doesn't seem to be any common factor except that both the 
"difficult" programs are games, hence my request for any advice to deal 
with them, or simply reasurance that this is quite normal and I'll just 
have to live with it. Every other program I possess, mostly costing 
considerably more than these games, will allow me to use them straight 
from the hard drive once they're installed, so why are the game 
publishers so paranoid about security, if that's what it is?

Rod.