IsoBuster saved me

[untergeek]

IsoBuster is awesome, not gonna lie. The price tag is a bit off-putting, but it delivered for me in a big way, so I will call it a win since I will be able to keep using it in the future for other discs that give me grief.

The ability of IsoBuster to "complete" a Managed Image by repeatedly (and automatically every 60 seconds at that) retrying the unreadable spots on what was otherwise a completely flawless, newly out of the box disc is the magic sauce.

To create the managed image:

1. Select the top-most disc icon in the left pane.
2. Right-click → "Create a managed IBP/IBQ image file"
3. Choose a location and filename (keep .ibp and .ibq files together with matching names).
4. Start the process. IsoBuster will read sectors intelligently, mark gaps for bad areas, and adjust retries dynamically.

If you've had unreadable locations, and IsoBuster doesn't read them on the initial creation of the Managed Image, not to worry! The "complete" image step is the next phase for you.

To "complete" a managed image:

1. Load the managed image by double-clicking on the .ibp file made in the create step.
2. Right-click the top icon in the left pane → "Complete"
3. You should be prompted which drive has the disc you will be attempting to read from. This is also part of the magic: you can try to read the disc from different drives—IsoBuster doesn't care
4. The resulting dialog box has check boxes you can select that instruct IsoBuster to keep trying and retrying until all have been read.

At this point, IsoBuster will spin up the disc and attempt to read the previously un-readable areas. You can see the counts in the bottom-left of the window, though it sometimes shows a message that "it could take time to read from bad sectors." If it fails to read, it will show a timer that counts down from 60 seconds before it automatically retries (if you selected the option to retry indefinitely).

If you are fortunate, it will have recovered all of the unread areas and have a complete managed image. Once this is the case, you can follow these steps I found in a separate post:

1. Use ISOBuster to 'Extract' the contents of the damaged disk to a folder
2. Open MakeMKV and choose to 'Backup' the disk to a different folder. Once the file "discatt.dat" is created stop the backup
3. Copy the file "discatt.dat" to the BDMV folder of the extracted contents
4. Open MakeMKV and click "File > Open File". Open the "discatt.dat" file in the BDMV folder.

Step 2 above is not quite complete, however. The full steps require making an encrypted backup. Those steps are also in a separate post here:

You start an ENCRYPTED backup of the disk in question, which can be canceled after the file discatt.dat is created in the main directory of the backup.

Copy discatt.dat to the directory that you copied the raw files to when you "copied the files to the hard drive".

Now, in MakeMKV, do a File->Open files, and have MakeMKV open discatt.dat .

Note: Mike noted that the drive you used to copy the files from the disk must be the same drive you use to do the encrypted backup to get discatt.dat. Otherwise, the decryption information will be incorrect.

Having followed this procedure, I have a fully functional extract from disc! I'm super happy about that. I have other discs which resulted in read errors. I think I will be able to try them again now!