'NO COPY' for no reason!

OK, I know, I'm too cheap to buy an MP3 player even though they cost next to nothing these days, but why should I when I have a perfectly good portable digital audio system that should work fine.

Enter my beautiful sony minidisc, well it's a bit scruffy being rather old, but still works fine. 'Digital recording' it boasts, which I have had working a long time ago. Back in the day I bought myself a Â£15 Aopen 4 channel sound card with optical out so I could record digitally. After messing around for a bit I got it working fine and dandy, just had to mute the other sources to stop background noise and play a non-copyrighted MP3 and all was good.

Wait a few years and along comes my next computer, an SN45G - fully equiped with the famous Soundstorm nforce2 audio. More digital ins and outs than you can shake a stick at (well 3, but nevermind). And now comes the problem, nothing works...

So I've tried windows, playing things through winamp, playing nothing, muting everything, I even took off the driver! Whilst this last trick stopped the 'NO COPY' message, I gained a 'NO SIGNAL' one which wasn't helping my mission to record digitally. I've tried Linux, and once again, regardless of what it muted or not, 'NO COPY' flashes at me.

So why am I so bothered? Obviously this isn't an issue with the MD player as it has worked before, and obviously this isn't an issue with windows/linux as it's the same in both, it's an issue with Nvidia. Why on earth are they stopping me controlling what I can and cannot listen to? I buy CDs and would like to copy them digitally to my MD player so I can listen to them where ever I go.

So if anyone has a magic solution to my optical problem please let me know. Else if you want to rant about copy protection go ahead.

ps I know it'll work fine in analogue, the point is I shouldn't have to when all I need is digital to digital rather than digital to analogue to digital.