I only have one CD drive in my computer, what is the quickest/best combination (preferably freeware) of programs to allow to rip the file to the harddrive and then burn it
For music ripping, cdex. For burning I'm not really sure what's good and free for windows... for non-free good things nero, clonecd and easy cd creator are okay.
The best solution for making a CD Copy, in this scenario, is to make an image of the master disc... most every CD authoring application is capable of this. Select "Image Recorder" as the CD-R device, and then burn as you normally would - instead of burning the data to a blank disc, it will prompt you to save the image as a file. Then, you burn that image onto your CD-R.