Hey everyone,
I am wondering if anyone has every had a cd get killed in a cd drive before. I kept my computer on overnight and went to work in the morning. When I came back from work tonight my computer was making a very load noise. I ejected the cd drive and the noise stoped, but the cd drive didnt eject all the way and when I finally yanked it out all the way, I found that the cd in the drive was torned to pieces. There was a giant chunk of the cd gone and pieces of it everywhere... =( .

I have heard of this happening before, but I am wondering if it has anything to do with kde. I know that kde has issues with cds, or at least in the past, where you couldnt eject the cd and would keep spinning the cd. You would have to kill a process to be able to even eject the cd out of the drive. All though I am using kde 3.4.2 right now and I can load and eject the cd just fine right now. Has anyone else had problems with their cd being destroyed or would anyone know what could cause this. Thanks everyone for the help!!!!!

I can say I've never heard of this happening before. I would say that it's more likely that it's a problem with the cd-drive rather than the software, but I suppose if the software (in this case KDE) would keep the cd spinning then after prolonged use it could destroy the cd...

Yea, it is pretty strange, I never had this happen to me before. The drive has worked fine for a while in windows and linux, so I was just thinking it might have to do with kde.. I havent had any problems though since I upgraded to the kde 3.4.2 from having the cd in the cd-drive keep spinning. I wonder how the cd started spinning in the first place... Well, thanks for the reply!

No problems! It would be nice to find out what was the cause of this problem though, it's very strange :S or does this happen more often than you would expect?

lol, yea, this is the first time this has happened.. Although it does seem like this plague of bad luck follows me everywhere. I am just going to make sure not to keep a cd in my new dvd burner!!

Yea, I just got one on Sunday, so I'm gonna be sure not to leave discs in my drives.

Some years ago, the same thing happened to me: the CD exploded within the drive.
Now this definitely doesn't have anything to do with your software, probably not even with your hardware. In a modern drive, a CD spins with several thousands RPM. There just needs to be a tiny crack in it (not even visible), and the CD is torn apart.
However, if it calms you down, I've had CDs for days (and nights) in my drive, and nothing happened to them. It seems like you can't protect yourself against such accidents, except if you throttle your drive down to, say 24x.

addy86, has hit the nail on the head... It's not a software issue at all or even the fact that leaving the CD in the drive would cause such a thing... It's just physics... CD drives have gotten higher in speed over the yrs These drives can spin up a cd very quickly at a high rpm and if their is a crack in the CD or it is not molded perferctly it will become un-balanced and you know the result.

I think even the fastest drives rearly have this problem and you would probably have a hard time duplicating it even it you tried.

KC

Have a look at this

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/51

floppy

Ahah! It all makes sense now...

Hey, thanks all for the replys. I have heard before on the screen savers that 52x cd roms are known to do this. Its just scary putting cds into my cd-drive now =( =P

Wait till they come out with 104x... We will have to buy stainless steel CD's

KC

Aha, yeah, and build our computers in air raid shelters

As the people above listed, isn't software based, but most likely a problem physically with the disk.

I dunno if you saw the Discovery Channel show MythBusters where they wanted to make CDs explode inside the drives - they had the best results when they used pre-damaged discs. Of course, when they used a router (not the networking kind) instead of the built-in motor.

I didn't find a link to a video of it, but I did find someone else that did another experiment like it:
http://www.powerlabs.org/cdexplode.htm