The disk inside the CD ROM drive exploded - bursted - whatever...
Disks spin inside the drive at very high speeds and only a small crack on one is enough to make a disk explode! No, there is no fire, but it's still very loud, and it may damage your drive permanently! One of my friends lost his CD Drive's front tray panel because a piece of the broken disc took a hard blow on it from the inside. (he found his tray lying 3 meters away from his PC )

Hi all

Bad thing that happened.Anyone watched Myth Busters,when they went on to expose the urban legend that CD's can blow up inside a CD drive?They put it on sub-zero temperatures for 24 hours,and then on high tempratures for another 24 hours.After that they put it in the CD drive (opened) and recorded how it worked.Nothing happened.The CD burst when they put in on 40.000 rpm's!

If you say your friend held his CD on cold temperature,and immediately put it in his drive,it's logical that the drive 'exploded'.Fast temperature change most likely was responsible for this.

And on account of some of you claiming that CD burst out flying,chopped off pieces of CD trays.CD just doesn't have enough momentum to do that to the CD tray.Then,in order for a CD to go out flying across the room,you need to spin in to close to 10.000 rpm,and send it off flying.There just isn't any physical explanation for tray door opening,and CD flying out.It could fly out maybe a meter out,no more.And that ofcourse if the tray opened WHILE drive was spining the CD.CD's are raised from the tray,and even if the tray opens,CD should stay inside,held by drive's axle.Those are just stories,and urban legends.We all love to exagerate now and then,even myself.I don't mean to call anyone liar or anything,far from it.I just say those are urban legends,nothing more.

Fact remains,that damaged CD,can burst inside a CD drive,but at low speeds that drives use,that kind of burst is generaly harmless,since CD's crack on tiny pieces.That's why CD's have a temperature range of -5 degrees Celsius,upto 55 degrees Celsius.Temperature changes,especialy quick ones,damage the structure of the CD.

And those tiny metal pieces are silver coating,that make up reflective layer of the CD.

I hope I said all I had in my mind,I feel like I'm missing something here

Cheers

Well, his room is kind of chilly during winter, and he has some old windows in his house (cold air from the outside can easily get in)... He probably took a CD from a spindle that stood next to that window. (still don’t know why he keeps his CDs over there)



The CD didn't fly out, but the front tray panel did! This is not the case for me, I had an 52x LG CD ROM drive that has the front tray panel firmly attached on the tray (it's in a whole piece), while my friend has an Asus CDRW 52x/24x/52x drive that, for some reason, has the front tray panel attached to the tray using some sort of a clip-on system (like every Asus CDRW, I guess) - he claims that he found the panel on the floor and clipped it on back on the tray without any trouble, and the drive worked.
Oh, and, even though the CD is lifted from the tray, you saw the mythbusters slow motion video clip - the CD starts "warping" in an unusual way before it "hits the bucket"! A piece of it may have flown off in another direction towards the tray panel because the whole CD was bending randomly.

The CD that broke my CD ROM drive had a small crack in it's inner circle. You might think that that is not enough to make it burst, but I recently almost placed a CD in my drive that also had a crack on it's inner circle... I bended it slowly and gently... As soon as I did that, the crack started expanding very quickly, towards the outer circle of the CD (until it finally snapped open)!

Hahaha. I had this happen once to my windows XP cd. this is what made the final decision for me to swith over to linux permanantly. I was in the middle of installing windows and there was a loud pop. I did not think much of it and I though it was just a standard error when windows stopped installing. I rebooted and heard rattling around. When I puch the eject on my CD rom, out came my windows XP CD in a million little peices.

I called microsoft to get a enw one and all they could tell me was that I needed to give them the numbers off of the center of the CD in order to get a replacment disk sent. They couldnt seem to understand that the CD was in so many little pieces it was impossible to get the numbers off, short of putting the puzzle back together(which I actually tried but gave up after about 8 hours).

Here is a pic of the damage it caused. By the wa, it also destroyed my CDrom drive.

http://www.PhotoServer.us/is.php?i=124119&img=DSC00529.JPG

It sounds as though your firend may have been overclocking his CD ROM drive.

Finally! A real picture of the "disaster scene"! Cheers, fraudulentpeanut!

Too bad I didn't have a camera back then...

I had a friend who had his Age of Empires 2 CD explode in his drive. It was a cheap drive,and there was no metal on the back. A tiny piece of the CD flew into the CPU fan, and broke that, causing the processor to overheat. Overall, his whole computer just crapped out because of a little nick in a CD.