Try something called drivespeed, cdspeed, or nero drivespeed and try reading at a slower speed. Starforce (new name is Frontline) seems to have a problem with this since it automaticly spins the disc at the max speed and ofcourse read errors might happen, now starforce is automaticly supposed to slow down the reading of the drive when it has trouble reading, but you know how it is. Windows xp might detect those read errors as Input/Output errors and thus starts to do a dma stepdown, which is usually bad for cddrives and can cause malfunctions since they are not supposed to operate in PIO mode under normal operations not to mention burning goes very very slow due to the pio mode (which is the slowest transfer rate, and the cpu does all the work).
Not to mention the protection has been known to spin the cd drives at max speed for as long as 20 minutes for some, before it passes or fails the cdcheck, the whole system is locked during that time. Meaning the cpu (all cpu cores) is at max load (100%), can't be good for the cd or the drive.
It also used to cause conflicts (and probably still does) with software like speedfan that monitors cpu temperature and controls the rpm of the fans to malfunction, since they have no cpu to process during that time and thus stops functioning. Where during heavy load they are supposed to speedup the fans but this doesn't happen since starforce (frontline) takes control of the whole cpu during its cdcheck leaving nothing left to other software and tasks, thus the cpu runs very, very hot. When they slowed the reading with something, like drivespeed it passed the cdcheck in just a few seconds.
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php
http://www.cdspeed2000.com/go.php3?link=nerodrivespeed.html
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Reading damaged discsWhen a drive has trouble reading a disc, it automatically slows down and reads the bad sectors again.
After reading the bad sectors, the drive usually spins up again. If there are many errors on the disc then the drive will constantly spin-up/spin-down. This is very bad for the mechanical parts of the drive.
By slowing down the drive by software, the drive does not need to change the speed while reading a damaged disc."