Creating Game Backups

Circumventing DRM mechanisms and/or creating backup copies of games and media for personal use is a right granted only in some countries. It is your sole responsibility to stay up to date with the law in your respective country. The information provided within this wiki is solely educational and its editors take no responsibility for the use or misuse of this information.

You may wish to take backups of your PlayStation 2 game discs, both as a protection against damage to the original, and in order to play the backup image instead of the original disc.

Disc Image Formats

PlayStation 2 original games come on two types of discs. The most common are DVDs, and have a silver underside. These should be backed up using the ISO disc format. Games that took less than 800MB were released on CDs, usually with a blue underside. These can be backed up as a BIN/CUE pair of files, or converted to an ISO. For burning onto a blank CD the BIN/CUE pair is preferred. For running on original hardware using Open PlayStation 2 Loader (OPL) ISO should be used. BIN/CUE file pairs can be converted to ISO using OPL Manager

Preparing / Cleaning your disc

If your PlayStation 2 format disc is dirty or scratched, it may not copy correctly. PC disc drives are more likely to be able to read the disc than an aging original PlayStation 2 drive, but you may still encounter errors.

1. Before attempting to back up your disc, check the underside to look for dirt, fingerprints, or scratches.
2. If the disc is dirty, blow off any dust or grit, and wipe from the centre outwards to the edge, with a clean lint free cloth (such as microfibre). If you don't blow off any grit first, you may scratch the disc by wiping.
3. If more cleaning is needed, spray Isopropanol (Isopropyl Alcohol) onto the cloth before wiping. The Isopropanol should evaporate quickly so drying time should not be an issue.
4. If your disc has scratches causing it to fail to read, you can have it resurfaced. Resurfacing is the process of a machine removing a very fine layer of the bottom plastic by polishing, in order to remove or reduce scratches.
5. You may find a local game shop or library that offers to resurface discs for a nominal fee.

Creating a Disc Image / Backup

You will need a PC with a disc drive capable of reading DVDs and CDs. External USB drives should work.

Windows

You can use a software like ImgBurn (free).

Steps:

1. Place your PS2 game into your disc drive.
2. Install ImgBurn (if you haven't already) and launch the program.
3. Click "Create image file from disc".
4. The bottom of the main window should read "Ready".
5. Click the folder icon next to "Destination".
6. Choose a folder to save the file into, and name the file. if you want ImgBurn to automatically convert a CD to ISO, change the file extension to .iso and the "Save as type" box to ISO Files (*.iso).
7. Click "Save".
8. Click the icon of the Disc with the arrow to the Disc on paper, (if you mouse over, it says "Read"). If a CD will be converted to ISO, a message pops up notifying you, click OK on it.
9. ImgBurn will copy your disc into a file, and report what is happening in the bottom window (ImgBurn log).
10. If ImgBurn has trouble reading parts of your disc, they will be listed as warnings with a yellow triangle icon in the log.
11. If any sectors of your disc are unreadable and unrecoverable, the icon will appear as a red triangle in the log. If this happens try cleaning your disc, or if it is scratched, having it resurfaced.

Linux

You can use a software like K3b. You can install it from your distribution's package manager.

Steps:

1. Place your PS2 game into your disc drive.
2. Install K3b (if you haven't already) and launch the program.
3. Select Copy Medium.
4. Then choose your drive as the Source Medium.
5. In the options tab under the settings box, check only create image.
6. Under the image tab, choose where the file should be saved and under which name.

Verifying your Backup

It's a good idea to verify that your backup doesn't contain any errors by checking its checksum. If just one bit is copied wrong, the checksum will be different.

For this, download the redump PS2 datfile. It's an XML file that can be opened with any text editor. It contains checksums and names for almost every PS2 disc.

Calculate your files checksum with the guide below. Then search for your checksum in the file. If it can be found, your dump doesn't contain any errors. If it couldn't be found, search for your games name in the file. If it's in the file but with a different MD5 checksum, it means that your dump contains an error. It might still work, but to be sure you can try copying it again.

If you cannot find your game in the file, it's possible that no one has dumped said game yet. This could be the case if you are copying a game that is not well known or from another region. In that case, consider adding it on redump.info.

Calculating the checksum (Linux)

1. Open a terminal in the same folder as your .iso file is.
2. Enter the command md5sum nameofyourgame.iso.
3. Wait for the calculation to finish.

Calculating the checksum (Windows)

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