Holy crap!

I've just witnessed one of the scariest things that have ever happened to me in my life.

I was sitting at my PC happily playing away and all of a sudden I heard a large bang eminating from my PC.

Never before have I moved as quick in my life-- Linford Christie could not have beaten me 5 mins ago.. the cause of the noise?

My Grand Theft Auto: Vice City PLAY cd exploding in my PC's CD Rom drawer.

Opening the tray- the cd was in small bits all around the tray and inside.. nearly gave me a heart attack.

Does this happen regularly does anyone know?
Anyone had this happen to them?
And why does it do it- any measures I can take for it to not happen again?

shoddy cd, manufactured with a flaw. A CD spins at many thousands of RPMs. Happened to me once - totalled the CD drive, ubt Macromedia (whose disk I was suing under licence) refused to accept any responsiility and pointed me to the etremely fine print on the readme file, on, you guessed it, the disc.

Generally this only happens with high speed drives (52 times speed. AFAIK). Try to limit the spin speed of the disk to 32 times or less.

Only guessing here +- any eggsperts out there,?

Saw an episode of Mythbusters on Discover the other day where they were testing the limit of a CD's tolerance to RPM's.

They hooked it up to a spindle on a router that had been attached to a souped up motor, and was capable of (I think) 50,000 RPM.

Bugger me, if I didn't flick channels during the break and missed the outcome.... doh!

Wow....

Never had it happen to me personally but I have encountered it in work. The CD in question was one of these business card shaped things and it splintered across one corner. I assumed it was weakness due to corner effects, but obviously it happens to other CDs as well.

On a mainly unrelated note a few years ago I did a 'Round Table' session on a community radio station. We decided to follow n the footsteps of Danny Baker and wreck the offending items. Take one angle grinder....one CD....and safety goggles! The CD shattered into fragments with a violence that was amazing. Apparently for weeks afterwards the users of that studio were occasionally interrupted by a quiet tinkling noise as another fragment fell out of the ceiling where it had embedded itself.....

Seriously, though, hope the damage wasn't too bad.

Joe

This has happened to me also, I have discussed it with Phan in the past.

Virtually killed my computer for some perculiar reason.

Was an original but old music cd so may have been fractured.

The exploding CD has happened to me on a couple of occasions; the most spectacular of which was when the cheap CD-R self-destructed, sending the dust-flap of the 48x CD-ROM drive into the air, where it landed a few metres away.

Sabotage...someone's out to get me :suspect:

Until I read this thread a few weeks ago I'd never heard of this happening. Now I've just experienced it myself with one of our genealogy census CDs which has just shattered into lots of pieces in our CD drive; unfortunately I hadn't made a backup copy either. Fortunately the CD drive still seems to work OK but we certainly haven't retrieved all of the bits out of it. Anybody know what the best thing to do with the drive now is - is there anything I can do myself or should it take it off to an expert straight away?

Originally posted by metalman
Until I read this thread a few weeks ago I'd never heard of this happening. Now I've just experienced it myself with one of our genealogy census CDs which has just shattered into lots of pieces in our CD drive; unfortunately I hadn't made a backup copy either. Fortunately the CD drive still seems to work OK but we certainly haven't retrieved all of the bits out of it. Anybody know what the best thing to do with the drive now is - is there anything I can do myself or should it take it off to an expert straight away?


Vacuum cleaner & crevice tool?

Originally posted by metalman
Until I read this thread a few weeks ago I'd never heard of this happening. Now I've just experienced it myself with one of our genealogy census CDs which has just shattered into lots of pieces in our CD drive; unfortunately I hadn't made a backup copy either. Fortunately the CD drive still seems to work OK but we certainly haven't retrieved all of the bits out of it. Anybody know what the best thing to do with the drive now is - is there anything I can do myself or should it take it off to an expert straight away?

To be honest I would consider replacing the CD drive. All it takes is for one minute piece of disc to scratch an original CD. Consdering CD-ROM drives are under a tenner, CD-RW are under £20 and DVD writers are under £40, it could be cheaper to do this than have to replace scratched CDs.

Your best solution for a game which requires a 'play' CD to be insterted is to make an image file of the disc. Then use a 'Virtual CD' program.

Alcohol Software do one, but it costs:
http://www.alcohol-soft.com/

As do Elaborate Bytes, theirs is free:
http://www.elby.ch/fun/software/index.html

And this is also a good free one:
http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/portal/portal.php

But there are many others.

Originally posted by ANGELUS
Holy crap!

I've just witnessed one of the scariest things that have ever happened to me in my life.

I was sitting at my PC happily playing away and all of a sudden I heard a large bang eminating from my PC.

Never before have I moved as quick in my life-- Linford Christie could not have beaten me 5 mins ago.. the cause of the noise?



I may be able to top that one....

Around a year ago a similar thing happened to me but the loud bang was acomponied by a plume of blue smoke. The cause...?

The phone line outside was struck by lightning, instantly melting my modem, as well as possibly transporting parts of my processor back to 1988. :P

Seriously. My computer was struck by ligtning!!

-PK-