OK, not quite an exploding CD, but it sure made me jump.

I was installing Windows on another system for an acquaintance earlier this evening. The CD had been spinning for sbout 5 minutes while Windows did its thing, and all of a suddent there was a loud bang. Really loud. Especially as I was leaning over the machine at that moment, inspecting which slots to use for some cards later on.

At first I thought it was something in the power supply, and I made a dash for the power cord, half expecting to see a plume of smoke rising out of the PSU slots any second.

Nope. Eventually I discovered that the CD drawer wouldn't open, although there were some ominous crunching noises as it tried. The movement as I pulled the drive out of the machine resulted in something that sounded like a percussion instrument.

The CD had actually shattered into many tiny pieces. When I took the covers off the drive, there were a couple of larger chunks left, but the rest was just shards of plastic and foil!

By the way, it took nearly an hour to clean out the drive. You wouldn't believe how hard the specks of foil from a CD cling to the inside of the drive! Fortunately, no damage seems to have been done to the drive and it's now working fine.

Anybody ever had this happen before?

the only thing of breaking cds in spin is about these damn form-cut CDs. as they are symmetric, it's ok, but there are somes like pretzels ore other stupid forms with audios on it. if you put them in your pc, of course the drive will spin them up to 40 whatever speed which causes heavy vibration and may cause the disc to break...

Paul:

Yes, I have heard of this!
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,105458,00.asp

P. S. It is especially likely to happen during high solar-flare incidents. (Actually, I just made that one up.)

I saw a show called Mythbusters recently and they put some CDs to the test. Most non-defective ones would survive 30,000 RPM. When they went above that, they would seemingly just disappear. You would be watching it spin up and then, it just wasn't there anymore. Disks with some sort of imperfection tended to come unglued at much lower speeds.

i saw the mythbusters episode too. I thought that experiment was very unscientific (like most of their other experiments). The computer they used was to slow to read data at a 52x rate, so the drive wouldn't spin up all the way. So instead, they put the CD on a 120V woodworking router plugged into a 240 volt outlet to get the RPMs up. the problem i see with this is in order to attach the CD they had to tighten it down with a nut. i would think this puts extra stress on it.

In past articles I believe I read that most CDs should survive at speeds up to 28,000 RPMs. In fact some high speed drives now have reinforced drive doors to prevent CD fragments from exiting the drive should a CD break-up.

For some more interesting info see what happens when someone uses a dremel to spin a CD. http://www.powerlabs.org/cdexplode.htm

cpalm, that was the first episode I've seen and a lot of it seemed about as stupid as most "reality" shows. I don't have a clue how tight they clamped it onto the router but CD drives do clamp the disk also when they run. I personally don't like the super high speed drives because they are so dang noisy. I can spend a few extra seconds in blessed silence waiting for my data.

hmmm, methinks homeland security would be all over this CD deal here....not so far fetched either with the latest 'almanac' snafu...

~S~

HI Paul,

I had this just happen to me a few hours ago. I was playing a game when I heard a big bang like a fire-cracker so I quickly pulled out the plug. Re-started my machine and everything worked ok. Was puzzled for a while until I tried to open my cd drive - wouldn't open.

I eventually got it open with a paper clip and found a bit of the cd I was playing but not the rest of the cd. Just got a new PC a week ago so the CDRW is brand new. Never happened before.

I haven't cleaned it out or anything so the drive is inoperable until I figure out what to do.

Hi there worldcitizen, and welcome to ECN. Nice to have another member from "Down Under."

Your fire-cracker description sounds about right. Really makes you jump, doesn't it?

I couldn't get my CD tray open more than about a half inch. I had to remove the drive from the machine and strip the covers off.