www.makemkv.com

About a year ago, I bought an external Blu-ray drive for my mac so I could turn Blu-rays into MKVs for YouTube.

I haven’t actually used it that much, but today after converting two movies, I tried doing a third and the drive started making this sound like it was skipping, even without a disk inside.

Now it only makes that skipping noise and then MakeMKV shows that no disk is inserted.

I’m unsure of what to do to troubleshoot or fix this issue, and I really want to repair the drive because I just don’t have the money to buy another, so any help is really appreciated.

Try unpowering it (turning off the switch or unplugging either the power or USB cables), waiting a moment, and then powering it again. There's a tiny computer inside the optical drive that runs the firmware. Sometimes it gets wonky and needs to be rebooted. Unpowering it and then powering it up is the only way to do that.