www.makemkv.com

I'm sorry if this isn't in the right spot.

So here's my situation: I'm planning on making an analysis video on a movie and I wanted to get the Director's Commentary, which was only available on the Blu ray. I ordered the Blu ray and an external player for my laptop so I could rip the footage. External player requires two USB drives, my laptop only has one. I have an adapter kind of thing so I tried that but my laptop kept saying that the drive was empty and Make MKV had a hard time loading it.
Plan B is to try my mom's laptop which has two USB drives already in it. Already better, the laptop is able to read it. The problem is that her laptop also has a disc drive in it, and MakeMKV recognizes that and not the external blu ray player I have plugged in. On my laptop it looked like it found the Blu ray player on its own, but it can't find it here.
So I guess my question is, is there a way to make it search? Or a way to make it work on my laptop? Or else something I could be doing different? I am brand new to this, I would appreciate any help. Thank you!

Powering the USB drive: You can use a "powered hub", which has its own power supply, and plug both ports into it. That will make sure the drive has full power available. Sometimes laptops can give "full power" to all ports if they're running on their charger.

There is a separate issue with adding hardware to a Windows 10 machine and getting Windows to allow MakeMKV (or any newly-installed program) to see it. Microsoft decided that "new programs" that don't come from the Windows 10 store are probably malware, and limits their access to hardware, unless you add an exception.