Questions about BU40N (Archgon)

[shadow-archetype]

I just registered for this forum.

First of all, I just want to say this is an amazing resource and I'm in awe all the work you all do to take on these onerous technical challenges.

Secondly, after a lot of painstaking effort I finally got one 4K movie backed up: Moonfall (2022, fairly recent). I plan to try others but haven't yet. However, I'm not sure if everything is in the ideal state yet.

I purchased an Archgon Slim external drive, which I understand qualifies as BU40N.

This brings up some questions I have:

1. Is there a known reason why only the 1.00 BU40N firmware works with Linux, and not 1.03?
2. Are there any potentially unfavourable consequences to having my firmware on 1.00, such as newer 4K's failing to backup?
3. Any ideas why makemkvcon hangs on Linux? Am I missing libraries and/or packages?
4. How do you suggest I go about investigating the above since I can go can back and forth from 1.00 to 1.03 as often as I choose? (logs, failed disk backups, etc)

Please read the below for more context.

* I was led to believe I could not update my firmware from Linux, only from Windows.
* I purchased a cheap Windows laptop
* SDFTool and makemkvcon both worked on Windows to flash my drive to either 1.03 or 1.00
* I could not back Moonfall on either 1.03 encrypted or unencrypted. I got SCSI errors and finally an error telling me I couldn't resolve AACS (If anybody's interested, I can retrieve the actual error messages).
* I could not run the same makemkvcon command on Linux. The command would simply hang indefinitely (I gave up after 15 minutes).
* Only after installing the 1.00 firmware was I able to do a successful backup, and I only got the idea of downgrading to 1.00 after reading another forum post.
* I could not get the drive to work with either firmware version on Windows. It would keep spinning trying to read the disk (meaning, the OS didn't even register the disk was in the drive). On Linux, the disk would always show, irrespective of whether the backup worked.

[shadow-archetype]

I answered one of my own questions thanks to this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=36171

The solution is to install the makemkv flatpak then downgrade it to 1.17.6

1. flatpak install com.makemkv.MakeMKV
2. sudo flatpak update --commit=01cd43d6aed487b21bc714a1541c17076bbf67113b677f5845ec9ffde8cfc988 com.makemkv.MakeMKV
3. cd /var/lib/flatpak/app/com.makemkv.MakeMKV/current/active/files/bin
4. /makemkvcon f -d '/dev/sr0' -f ~/Junk/4k-firmware/sdf.bin rawflash main -i ~/Junk/4k-firmware/DE_LG_BU40N_1.00.bin

Works like a charm!