Drive refusing to even read Spider-Man (2002) DVD

[buteramagz]

So, I recently just bought the "full screen special edition" DVD for the original 2002 spider-man movie. Since I only have region 2 players, I thought I'd just rip the disc directly and put this edition of the movie on my plex server.

However, when I put the disc in my optical drive (LG BD writer), nothing happens. It sounds like the drive starts to spin up the disc before abruptly ending a second later. In Windows, it says no disc is inserted (same for MakeMKV) and nothing I tried remedied this.

I literally can't figure out why this is happening. I don't think my drive is the issue here (at least I can't see why it would be) as it has worked flawlessly for everything else I've put in it (including the 2nd disc that's included in this "special edition" package). And the problem disc itself is, well, brand new with no scratches or anything of that sort on the surface. If I insert the disc into my 4k blu-ray player, it does show up that message saying the disc will only play on region 1 players, but then, why doesn't it do the same when inserting into my PC (I have PowerDVD installed but like Windows itself & MakeMKV, it reports no disc inside).

Does anyone have any idea as to why this is happening or what could be causing this (or how I could go about troubleshooting it)? Any help is appreciated.

[preserve]

It sounds like an issue with the drive recognizing the disc since it’s not just MakeMKV giving you an issue on this particular disc. So it’s either the disc (despite the disc looking physically okay) or it’s your drive reading the disc (despite the drive working on other discs).

One thing I’ve done on the handful of occasions when a DVD is giving me any issues is use an old DVD-only drive instead of a Blu-ray drive, and doing so has always solved my issues.

Have you tried cleaning the disc? See the disc cleaning discussion here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=15055

I didn't have an issue with this movie, although I had the Widescreen Special Edition from Canada, bought when it originally came out.

[buteramagz]

Yep, already tried cleaning the disc prior to posting here but that made no difference.

So, I think you're right in saying my best option would be using a DVD only drive but unfortunately, I don't currently have any old drives laying around and so, I'm probably going to just purchase a cheap external one. But I guess it's always good have a secondary backup drive so it's fine.

Thanks for your help :)

[Woodstock]

Newest BD drives have gone back to having red lasers for DVDs, but they still are not as tolerant of marginal disks as actual DVD drives.