Any way to play Monster Rancher 4?

I've been playing monster rancher 4 from the hdd and it is playable, but as you probably think you cant do the disk scanning for monsters part of the game. I was thinking that possibly it would scan whatever is in the dvd drive, then when I take it out go back to reading the game from the hdd. That doesn't work though. Any way to do this or do I just have to play from the actual game disk?

You'll have to use the disc for monster generation. Once you've created your monster, though, you can play from the HDD.