Exploding CD in Drive?

Question

Has anyone ever had a disk brake/explode in their CD/DVD drive? I was in the middle of installing a printer driver, out of nowhere "Boom" (Same sound as when you bend a CD in half) My first thought was that one of my fans broke but they were all fine. Realizing it was my drive, I took it out, opened it up, shook out the peaces and put it all back together. Works fine again. How did it happen? I've had it for about 10 months with no problems, then all of a sudden, POW! The drive is a PLEXTOR 16X DVD±R DVD Burner. I was thinking maybe a bad CD?

Mythbusters was one of the first things that came to mind. Nothing shot out the sides of the case it all stayed in the drive. The CD was relatively new, being a printer driver; I didn't get much use out of it. I didn’t' add any stickers to it, but it did have the factory sticker. I've also used the CD a few times before today.

Oh yeah it was from HP. I like their printers just not thier exploding CDs. lol

Answer 1

Ever see the Mythbusters episode where they did the exploding CD?

The first answer you have is correct, or at least it's one solution for your problem if you had a sticker or anything on it. Believe it or not, the weight from that one sticker will actually throw of all of the CD's momentum and caused the thing to just shatter everywhere. The thickness shouldn't be a problem regarding the CD itself but the balance sure does when it's rotating at ridiculous speeds.

Another thing that could have caused the break is a poorly-made CD. On the show, they had some CDs that were known to be faulted CDs and tried those out. Those were quicker to shatter than the normal ones. But also note that the Mythbusters used a modified CD drive for their experiments: it had no external casing and was left wide open for the CD to flop around like Mick Jagger's arms. They also increased the speed of the CD drive to something like 30,000 RPM or some ridiculous speed like that, I think a normal CD drive is a lot lower than that.

I'd say you're dealing with a bad CD from the factory. There's nothing you can do now about it except just to never buy anything from that company that the CD came from.

Answer 2

This will happen for two reasons.

1) The CD/DVD Disc was faulty and failed under the loads imposed under rotation.
2) The Drive was faulty and went "Over speed" and the Disk failed under the extra load imposed by rotation speeds it was not designed for.

As the drive is working ok now it sounds like it was a faulty CD/DVD Disc.

Personally I would not be to keen on using a drive after a CD/DVD disintegrated in it. All those specs and shards of plastic you can never get out and could be dangerous.

Disks disintegrated in the Drives happens rarely but it does happen. As you have seen.

Answer 3

If there are enough small defects on the drive, and it's not spinning in a perfect spin, it can become unbalanced and break because of the stress caused by the plastic bending and flexing.

There was actually a "Mythbusters" episode dedicated to this. They couldn't get one to break under normal conditions in a 52x CD-rom drive (which is probably the speed your DVD-drive operates at when reading CDs), but by slightly damaging the CDs, they were.

Answer 4

yes, I had that happen once. The CD was cracked when I put it it and when it spun up to full speed it blew off the front door of the CDROM and scared the crap out of me! I won't use a cracked CD again

Answer 5

I heard of this happening with people who stick labels
on their cd/dvd,s.

Answer 6

I've never heard it actually happening, but I've replaced a drive where it has happened. I've also heard of one at my work. Probably bad media with a slight crack in it?

Answer 7

Gas leak in the house ? ^_^

Actually, theoretical, if the Drive was running as hot as an oven, it could cause the CD to explode.....