CD drive blew up

[Deepak]

I put in the office xp installation cd. It showed the loading screen, and after a few second there was a blast, I managed to pull out the tray, but the CD was broken into several piece. I never heard/saw something like this ever before. What was the reason?

 

[wireframe]

CDs & DVDs rotate at very high speeds. The torque ca be quite extraordinary and this is why we have seen CD/DVD players level off in speeds; they are at the boundary where the physical medium would be torn apart if it rotated faster. The reason your CD "exploded" was probably due to some fracture in the disc or perhaps some mass sticking to it, causing it to become unbalanced. Of course, your drive may be faulty or "not nice" in how it handles spin-up, thereby exacerbating the situation. I would replace the drive as the destruction of the CD may have caused significant damage to the hardware.

Gather the pieces of the destroyed disc and have a look here for information about getting a replacement.

 

[Guden Oden]

Tiny cracks in polycarbonate will propagate extremely quickly if the material is stressed; it is a very strong plastic, but rather brittle! 40x or more drives can rotate the disc at over 10.000RPM, no wonder it disintegrates if it suffers material failure... I read about a guy who nearly got his jugular punctured when shards of a CD erupted from his optical drive, be glad you didn't suffer that fate.

 

[mito]

Was it a no name cd-r?

 

[PC-Engine]

Was it a no name cd-r?

Yep probably a pirated version of XP corporate too.

 

[mangrove]

http://www.paintbug.com/cdexplode/