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Wow, this is a new one. I recently got several 4K UHD discs, including Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and I was working on putting them on my server.

All the other discs have gone fine, but Spider-Man was having read issues. I have multiple drives, so I typically move the disc to a new drive on each attempt, as sometimes one drive works better than another.

On the 3rd drive/read attempt, it seemed to be working well, finally. I had also just upgraded foxy to the latest, so that might have helped too. Instead of stopping at like 2%, it made it all the way to 35%. All of a sudden, I heard very loud grinding noises, minimal at first but getting worse with every passing second. I was across the room, so it took me at least 10 seconds to react and get to the drive. By the time I was hitting the eject button, it actually sounded like the disc had already exploded in the drive, and I was expecting to see just fragments emerge.

Surprisingly, the disc was still whole, but extremely hot, and definitely looks scratched. There's nearly a continuous ring of scratches near the outer edge.


I have no idea if this was a fluke, perhaps the drive simply failed, or if the data on the disc somehow caused the issue. It might have overheated the drive, causing parts to warp or even melt, resulting in a head collision with the disc.

I'm reminded of the Stuxnet virus that destroyed those enrichment centrifuges by overspeeding them. Is it possible that the studios have figured out a way to destroy our drives with the data written a certain way on the disc? Or perhaps foxy 8.6.6.0 has a serious issue - this is the first time I've used this version, I was on 8.6.5.0 before.

I'm not sure if the disc is actually damaged or not. I seem to be able to wipe away the scratch marks. Perhaps that is debris rubbed off from the internal drive components.

I'm scared to put another disc in this drive, but I guess I'll have to in order to test it. I need to find a crappy DVD I don't like. It's an LG drive, in case anyone's curious.

I think it may be caused by a defect in the UHD disk not the drive. I've heard about disks exploding due to defective discs. There may have been a small crack in the disk which may have first caused the read errors on other drives. The disc may have harmed the drive though so be careful what to use to test it. You may need to open up the drive to see whether there are disk fragments in the drive, or see whether you can see some broken parts. Be careful not to touch the lense.

My guess is that the read issues with the disc were causing very long copy times, and that the drive overheated.

Outside of the new blemishes from the drive fiasco, the disc looks unharmed - certainly no cracks. I need to clean it, seems like the scratches rub off, and I can't see any actual scratches. By the way, don't use alcohol. Years ago, I used to use Isopropyl alcohol to help clean disc, not realizing that it can damage the plastic.

I've yet to do any further testing of the disc or drive. The tray opens/closes fine, but not sure that means much.

I use Dawn dish soap with warm water to clean oil and blemishes on my disks. Works on everything!