Has anyone else heard of this happening?

I downloaded the 3 Mandrake 10 ISO's, and burned them on 3 Maxell CD-R 80XL-S 700MB cd's, using eroaster and a BCE-5224IM CD-RW bought from PCWorld.

I then started an upgrade to my Mandrake 9.1 install.

Everything was going smoothly until I was asked for the third cd. After running up to speed, and about 20 secs into its operation there was an explosion. I know, I know, it sounds kinda dramatic, but its an accurate description.

The drive doors were blown open by the force, and half off its hinges. The front of the tray flew off, and there were tiny pieces of the gold coloured covering shimmering in the air, along with scraps of cd.

Needless to say my drive is u/s with chunks of cd jammed all over the place, and Ive put my old one back in.

I e-mailed Maxell about this (Two weeks ago), got a stock reply and promise of further action and......nada.

Maxells' info on their cd covers say they are not responsible for loss of data, but what about hardware if its a faulty cd?

Dunno what the legal position is, does anyone else?

I guess it'll be as normal: "Our product screwed up, but hey its a pc thing, so the consumer has no rights."

I don't think the drive was to blame because it's been burning (Imation) cd's and playing music ROM's for months now with no probs.

Any obs welcome......

My husband has had CDs blow up as you describe (literally blown to shattered bits inside the drive)-- but we were lucky; the exploding pieces did not make it all the way out of the drive.

So for us, the larger pieces only got stuck between the edge of the tray and the drive case (and his PC doesn't have a door on the front), so even if the tray had been knocked open by the CD fragments, it wouldn't have hit something else and possibly broken as well.

Now, I've asked him about these events (I was present, but it wasn't my CD-ROM drive, so my memory could have been faulty), and he suggests the following:

1) If your drive is still under warranty, RMA it. It's certainly possible that the CD itself caused this accident (we'll come to that in a minute), but it also could be the drive, and in any case it needs to be checked/fixed. If the repair people of the place you bought the drive are reasonable, don't forget to see if they will document the damage to the drive and if they see any problems with it that might have caused the CD to blow up (rather than that the CD blew up and damaged the drive). This information may help you with Maxell, when you send them.....

2)... the pieces of the broken CD (as many of them as you can; try to reconstruct the entire CD with all the pieces. Hope you haven't thrown them out). The most important section to reconstruct is the transparent inner ring between the center hole and the silver, where the serial and batch number of the CD are normally printed, but the more, the better.

If nothing else, Maxell owes you a CD. With the documentation from the Returns/RMA tech people, you might have a case to get compensated for the damage to your PC, if the repair indicates that the CD damaged the drive and not that the drive caused the CD to explode.

Sorry not to have better news, but at least it's news-- and at least you know this has happened to someone else at least... three times .

Thanks for your reply Hollly.

Hmm, dont know how many of the bits I still have. There are a coupla big chunks still in the drive an I saved a piece which is about 1/4 of a cd, intact from outside edge to middle, so that is something.

We've got two border collies (Jasper an Tyler) so my other half soon got into action with the hoover to stop them hurting their paws on the shards, but these were pretty small bits.

I hav'nt as yet informed the retailer, because I was waiting for Maxells response first.

I'll post again, when things start to move. This pc larks never dull is it? lol

Jon

Yes I get that... we have a cat, so immediate cleanup was indeed called for, plus we actually had to take the drive out and dismantle it to get all the big CD pieces out (we're geeks, we do things like that. It's our version of "quality time" ). We actually were able to get most of the CD reconstructed; at least it was enough for the retailer to send back to his distributor and so everybody got compensated for the CD at least. The drive was old, so it wasn't worth fighting about who did what to whom, and besides, the drive did function after we got all the silver out of the works (at least, long enough for us to eventually get a new one because this old one was too slow in any case). But with a new drive like yours, I'd definitely make a stink, because that's just wrong.

Oh, and stick to Imation in future, apparently .

Yep, I've never had any problems with Imation.

I should point out that the Maxells were a Christmas prezzie from an auntie, so what do you reckon, should I sue her for replacement of my drive an cd, or would that seem churlish? lmao

I am not admitting to taking the drive apart, as that would invalidate the warranty, but if I were to consider doing so, because I dont think I'll get much joy out of either Maxell or PCWorld, is there a web resource dealing with do's an dont's, or is it simply a matter of unscrewing an taking the crap out?

I know from other dealings with PCWorld, that they seem to have a policy of "If you take it out the box and install it on your pc, then we won't replace it cos you probably damaged it an thats why it's not working."

This none replacement policy, which I was told about at one of their checkouts, came as I was buying two sticks of 128MB memory. I had asked that if I had bought the wrong type, could I swap an pay any difference.

No was their reply.

Imagine my delight when I got home, installed the two sticks an booted up. 512MB was reported, an this was confirmed by dxdiag (I only had Win98 installed at the time). Well, what could I do? If I took em back, they would refuse to swap em, so I kept em. Result all round I fink lol.

Jon

Iirc, it was simply a matter of taking off the front panel, unscrewing four or six smallish screws. and taking the crap out. A CD-ROM drive doesn't have moving parts (except the tray), so there was no fear that some tiny little spring would fall out and get lost (like the problem I had when I took apart my entire mouse to clean every damn part of it, dammit, and that very thing happened (OK, I didn't lose the spring, just had the devil's own time trying to put it back where it belonged). But as I recall, the CD-ROM was pretty straightforward in it's construction.

Cool about getting 2 sticks of 256 instead of the 128 you paid for. If they're so churlish, you deserved a nice gift like that for shopping there .

Have you seen my post about my probs with kernel-2.6.5? Forum installation.

I looked at ur profile an you've got a full year ahead of me in using Linux, and you may be able to help.

It's a cheek I know, but.....lol

Jon

OK, maybe I'm just dim, but I cannot find either an "Installation" forum, nor any post/thread by you relating to kernel, install, or kernel 2.6.5.

Otherwise I'd be happy to drop in... want to pop me an actual link?

Erm, I'm as dim as you, I can't find it either.

See if this link works for you

http://64.4.30.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_l...goto%3dnewpost

Heres hopin.

By the way, its nothing to do with:

>CONFIG_IDE=Y
>CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE=Y
>CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDISK is not set

cos in my .config >CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDISK=y

I found some other people who had the same error, an that was the cause of theirs, but not mine.

Jon

Nope. MSN (!!!) says Your email message has been idle and this link has become inactive.

Are you sure it was on these forums? I did a search on your username and the only thread you've started here is this one; the other posts are helpful replies in others' threads.

Oooops,

An admin has moved the thread to Technical, cos it didnt fit where I'd originally posted.

http://justlinux.com/forum/showthrea...hreadid=127251

Jon

Technical? Technical????
Here is the list of forums on this site:

As you see, there is no such animal as a "Technical" forum on the LinuxQuestions.org site, and as I said, I did a search of your posts on this forum by your username, and the only thread you have started is this one. So, as far as I can tell, it's not here, but on some other forums. Maybe you should post you question here as well, though, whatever it is .

Honestly, I did post my 2.6.5 Q here.

http://justlinux.com/forum/showthrea...hreadid=127251

This is the link from Mozillas addy window as I book marked it.

Jon

ps its too long to repeat lol

This is LinuxQuestions.org, NOT justlinux.com .

I found it there, though.

Now dont I feel the plonker. lmao

Well, at least u got there, hope it was worth the wait !!

Jon