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Hi, I suspect this is just the usual dead disc problem which I've had with another film, Crank 2 High Voltage. But odd thing is it works in my Blu-Ray player, so would like a second opinion please.

Pandorum worked fine in 2020 when I last ripped the disc in a BH16NS55 drive flashed with Mk firmware. Went to rip it again last week and it is no longer recognised, MakeMKV just says "No Disc" after it spins up and down a few times. Windows doesn't see a disc in the drive either. As I say the disc plays fine in my Blu-Ray player though (Panasonic DMP-UB900).

Tried cleaning disc several times very very thoroughly, but no change. I recently bought a WH16NS40, so also flashed with MK firmware and I tried it with that drive instead, but it does the same thing. I went on eBay and bought a cheap replacement disc which showed up and looked clean enough (no marks or anything) but has the exact same issue. Tried cleaning the replacement anyway a few times, still not recognised. Even tried downgrading to an older MK firmware on the drive, which also didn't work for either disc, then I tried upgrading back to the original stock firmware (1.05) for the drive using the official firmware flashing tool, still doesn't recognise the discs.

I'm assuming they are both dead and I just got unlucky with the second one (as mentioned already, I had the same issue with Crank 2 but a replacement bought from eBay worked fine - well for about a year then that replacement died as well, so I ended up getting a third replacement for it which still works but this time I've made a full backup image of the disc).

It was the disc. I ended up buying yet another copy and sent the first one back and this one worked.

Annoyingly though, I went to rip another blu-ray I'd messed the encodes up on, so I ripped this disc last week and it worked fine. Put it in the drive and it was giving me no disc in MakeMKV. Cleaned it, tried again, No disc!

So I punched the drive. In a fit of rage I brought my fist down on it hard because I was really angry. You may wonder how I did that as it's an internal drive; well it's not internally fitted to my PC you see, my computer case has no optical drive bays so I ran a power and SATA cable out the back of it onto my desk and that's where the drive sits in an enclosure which I removed the back off of so I could connect the cables to it.

Anyway I hit it, and it started vibrating really loud and... Oh look, the disc started to be recognised again! Only issue was it was vibrating so bad I obviously broke something in it and it was probably going to damage the disc so I have remove it. Put my old drive back in and that still works fine, read the disc first go.

I don't think I'll be buying LG drives ever again. They apparently don't make them like they used to.

You know they make enclosures for optical drives. Put the drive in the box and plug it into your computer via USB.

There's the OWC Mercury Pro. I have two of these, one with an ASUS drive and one with an LG drive. Vantec makes enclosures too. I have a Vantec NexStar DX NST-536S3-BK with a Pioneer drive inside since the Pioneer won't fit into a Mercury Pro enclosure.

None of these will make any individual optical drive work any better, but they look less janky.

As a side note, it is always my keyboard that ends up taking the brunt of my physical rage.

Oh yea I've looked at enclosures, because you're right of course; having the bare drive on the desk does look totally out of place, although the enclosures tend to be a bit pricey over here for some reason (that OWC costs around £80). I did look into getting some sort of cover for the drive just so it looked a bit less "bare metal" but couldn't find anything fit for purpose.

I don't normally punch the drives incidentally (my keyboard is also the thing that usually gets the brunt of my anger issues), I just was so annoyed that this new drive stopped reading a disc inside of a week when it worked fine before. The fact is I only bought the WH16 new because of Pandorum, as well as a couple of other films were giving me issues where as they hadn't beore and I couldn't believe the discs were dead or dying and decided it *must* be the drive. But turned out of course Pandorum was dead, somehow, one of the others started working again after I cleaned it several times with Isopropanol of all things, and the third disc works but kicks out read errors when I try and rip the movie off it, no amount of cleaning fixed that so it must also be on the way out too.

In other words I had no need to replace the BH16 drive in the first place. So now I have a dodgy WH16 which isn't fit for purpose even without my fist-damage.