I've read about this before, actually. People were freaking out about CDs exploding in extremely high-speed drives and wondering whether 48x or 52x was just too dang fast. It turned out, though, that all of the exploding discs were already cracked.

Oh yeah, I got reports of stuff like this happening when I worked support at EA. People were all, "I was spinning a CD of your 5-year-old game with a crack in it in my 5000X speed drive and it shattered and now you owe me a new CD drive!!!1"

I also have read that putting stickers and labels on a CD can cause them to spin off balance and potentially blow up in high speed drives.

can't you just hold the CD up to the light and read the 1's and 0's? then you can painstakingly re-type all of them into your computer and have it translate it into the original documents.

doesn't that work? doesn't it?

They have a show called Mythbusters on Discovery. They created some really fast CDrom spinners and caused them to explode. Be thankful that you were shielded by the case because their CD drives were exposed and the shattered CD imbedded itself in this dummy.

Crazy stuff...

-Dave

Mythbusters is not always factual although they are moreso than most shows of that sort. They specifically say "jelleton acuratly represents human flesh" my comment to this is when was the last time you got a spoon stuck in your arse??? From the pictures I saw, it could leave a bit of a bruise and a few scratches you would not be any worse for the wear unless you get one in your eye then you are F***ed.
I have messed with it a little, a perfect cd is almost impossible to shatter but cracks make it a lot easier, but by far the best is still microwaving them. (I would highly recomend not putting a microwaved cd in a drive because there is rumor that this will cause it to shatter in the drive as explained in the article.

ps: if anyone has a photo of the instant that the cd explodes please send it to penguinpower_2@yahoo.com

I wanted to take a picture of the shattered CD shards in my drive but I did not have a camera here. You would need to have a high speed camera to take the shot. Just check out the video at the Physics test that I linked to.

Some Uni in Queensland tested the Enterprise in a Mach 5 wind tunnel. http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/lp/lasdiag/enterp.shtml

Yeah I got a link to that in my suggested reading already

The jello that they used in Mythbusters is ballistics jelly - it does mimic human flesh.

An explosive CD event happened to my brother when he was attempting to install a slightly old version of CorelDraw. He even used the exact same language describing it: "BAM!" :)

The event elicited a slightly panicked and rather bewildered email from him to me; I had never heard of such a thing, but a hurriedly crafted google search led me here (and other places) and convinced me that he was not yanking my chain.

(And yes, Virginia, it *is* "centrifugal force": 'proceeding or acting in a direction away from a center or axis'; not "centripetal force": 'proceeding or acting in a direction toward a center or axis'.)

It would have been nice if my brother had visually inspected the CD before he put it in the drive, but alas, not all of us are quite that ... retentive.

Regarding the originating poster's (Jake) observations about the crack in the CD, it is my humble suggestion that a small crack alone would not significantly alter the mass distribution of a CD to the point of causing it to provide sufficient eccentricity to create a "failure mode" (ie *boom*) of the CD; if it were a case of gross imbalance, the bearings (or if it were a direct drive motor, then the motor) would likely have seized up.

Rather, I would observe that any small crack (whether radial or longitudinal) would have greatly reduced the tensile strength of the media and that would have been far more likely to cause the media, not the drive, to experience catastrophic failure.

This suggests that it is wise to perform at least a cursory visual inspection of CD media before putting it in our machines.

For the record, my brother ended up replacing his CD drive (after cleaning out the shards and detritus) and is operating just fine. He does, however, no longer assume that something is good just because it used to be good or other folks say it's good.

He's becoming a good empiricist. :)

Best to all,
John

Oh I am allways getting centrifugal force confuesed with centripetal force.

My experience of an exploding CD led me to type in the descriptive words which led me to here. It happened last Friday morning. It was POP! POP! POP! in quick succession - just after something like 10 seconds of inserting it.

As far as I could see, unlike some suggestions earlier,there were no cracks - and I used terribly huge cracks in several CDs before and nothing happened.

I also doubt the label is a problem: many CDs have labels as thick as microwave plastic food wraps: the experience made me realize this as pieces were held together by this painting.