www.makemkv.com

In late 2018 I purchased an Asus drive from Alex and it has been faithfully performing ever since. I'm methodical regarding my process to the point of obsessiveness, one might say.

1. Receive the disc
2. Wash hands to remove oils
3. Place 3-4 drops of mild dish soap on disc
4. Gently rub with warm water from center out
5. Rinse
6. Dry with a fine-weave microfiber cloth
7. Inspect under good light
8. Rip
9. Clean oils from case before replacing

Recently, I encountered a hard-to-rip disc and, after several attempts, it finally ripped but not without some fanfare - lots of drive seeking, multiple speed changes and 3 very small audio sync issues, for which timestamps were noted. The final rip looked fine, however, and there were no odd audio dropouts or noticeable sync issues at the noted timestamps. Given that this is such a rare event, I chalked it up to a less than perfect press. Erring on the side of caution, I cleaned the disc again and planned to retry in an attempt to achieve a perfect rip. However, during subsequent attempts the disc failed to open.

Again, assuming a bad press was at fault, I attempted to rip a few new discs. These also resulted in errors when attempting to open the disc. I then went back to known good discs and still had issues - again, tons of drive seeking noise, difficulty open the hash files and ultimately, MakeMKV hanging. MKV noted each time that hash errors were the source of the issue, likely indicating a failing drive. I rebooted the system several times to no avail and prepared to send an email to Alex to purchase a new drive.

Frustrated at the prospect of defeat, I did what any good IT Systems Engineer would do - I turned it off and on again. Specifically, I powered down the PC, removed power, performed a flea power drain, got a beer, and turned it back on. Lo and behold - the problematic disc now not only read fine, but ripped cleanly.

So I just wanted to post this in case someone runs into this or a similar issue. Take a deep breath, power everything down, and give it one more try. That said, I think I'm going to order another drive to have a spare on hand.