This afternoon I was sitting with my youngest son at the computer while he was playing Reader Rabbit : Thinking Adventures. He was bouncing along through an activity when we heard a popping noise and I felt something hit my leg.
We both sat there for a second trying to figure out what had happened and that is when I saw the front trim piece of the DVD drive hanging from the computer. The piece that hit me in the leg was one of the plastic clips that holds the trim piece in place and as soon as I saw what had hit me, I knew the CD was toast.
After unplugging the machine and a little disassembly, I had the drive out and removed most of the pieces from the explosion. I’ve already ordered a replacement drive from NewEgg.com (thanks for the recommendation Shawn).
Rather than try to explain something I never thought I would see, I’ll let the pictures finish the story:
There you have it – pictures from the aftermath of an exploding CD. As you can see above, I was able to piece most of the CD back together but there are still quite a few pieces inside the drive. Hopefully the new DVD drive will arrive soon and I can have their machine back to normal.
Nothing like a little fun on a Wednesday afternoon!
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Nice explosion…
Wow, that’s just weird. How can the disc explode like that?
Were you cooking again, Derek?
I know that CD’s can explode if they are spun too fast, I saw it on Mythbusters…
@WT :: Thanks! 🙂
@Leo :: I have no idea how it happened. I’ve never seen anything like it before. And I wasn’t even close to the kitchen.
i blame the learning company for this explosion . . .it’s probably the composition of the dvd they used . . . i’m glad you saw the bright side of it and pieced it back together like a puzzle! hahahha . . . good luck with the replacement!
was that the drive that came with the computer? um that’s kinda freaky! what if your dog was sitting loyally by your side and it took out his little eyeball!! >=(
I think the Myth Busters did an episode on exploding CDs. I don’t remember what the outcome was but from the looks of your table – Myth Confirmed.
@Gary :: Yeah, The Learning Company gave me a lesson on how their CD could ruin my DVD drive. 🙂
@Danielle :: Yes, it was the drive that came with the computer. It was a Sony DVD-ROM drive that was standard with the Dell machine the wife and kids have. As you mention, there was potential for something bad to happen but we were pretty lucky.
@Chris :: Yeah, I do recall an episode on Myth Busters as well but don’t recall the details. I thought they had said it would require the drive to be operating at extreme speeds but something obviously happened inside my drive.
oh great, my desktop at home is a dell… i will take note of geoff’s sentiments (below). no more nudging for me…!
I just had this happen to my daughter who just so happens was also playing a reader rabbit CD. Conspiracy? Lack of quality?
When I was a kid, they were touting those things as “indestructable.” Ha!
I’ve already heard of exploding CDs before but this is the first time I’ve seen pictures of it. One of my friends had the same problem a couple of years ago. I believe he was playing Call of Duty (or another FPS game) and suddenly the disc exploded in his DVD player.
Do you want another copy of Reader Rabbit. I can send you my copy? What a mess.
Classic shots dude! Especially that first dagger looking one! glad everyone is okay!
Thanks Damien! I was trying to have some fun with the pictures so I’m glad that you liked them.
@Two :: Lol, right! I’ve seen CDs take a lot of abuse before but this was pretty shocking to me.
@Thomas :: Glad I was able to share the pictures with you so you can see a little of what it looks like. It certainly surprised us when it happened.
@Rose :: Thank you for the offer! I’m thinking of contacting the company to show them the pictures of what happened and ask if they will replace the CD. We do have other titles of Reader Rabbit so I am sure the kids will be fine without this one.
It may be a conspiracy to kill children, or render their fathers sterile. I wonder I how I can get in on it 😉
You want to have shards of plastic sever your nuts?!?! 😯
Non, no, no . . . the kill children part.
Never saw anything like that. That might be a good reason to run most apps from the hard drive haha.
Dude, that looks like a Dell. That’s your problem right there 😆
Just glad no one was hurt 🙂
man and you never saw it coming… i’ve never heard of exploding DVDs… Dells aren’t that bad, well i take that back i think they’re getting their stuff together… just imagine if it was an HP…
I’ve seen this before, I’ve repaired a pc this happened too. In addition my father is an IT professional and says this kind of thing happens more than you would think it should at work. The problem is that the physical properties of cds and dvds aren’t strong enough to handle high RPM’s. Even though 9 times out of 10 this isn’t going to happen, it is even possible at speeds as low as 48000x. It doesn’t have anything to do with your cd drive or the brand of cds you buy, it’s due to variance in the manufacturing of cds. Fortunately cds seem to be manufactured at a fairly high sigma so we rarely have this but it makes you wonder if maybe we maxed out with our drive speeds.
@Leo :: I thought you already were sterile. 😉
@Brown Baron :: No kidding, I might have to make that a requirement for the kid’s games that they play.
@Stephen :: Lol, it is a Dell and I actually contemplated whether I should post that picture incriminating myself. I’m not a computer building expert like some of you so I went the easy route. 🙂
@Blog Money :: Never expected anything. We didn’t even hear any noise beforehand, just the pop and pieces flying around.
@Steve :: I certainly hope it isn’t the drive as I ordered a nearly identical drive to replace it, lol. What you say about the CDs makes sense and I certainly don’t want to spin them any faster. 😀
I try to render myself sterile by masturbating a lot. If I miss a few days I’m screwed.
i never heard of an exploding cd. it is good no one was hurt, it could easily hit someone in the eye
This happened to me four years back when I was playing “Lego Island”. It was such a fun game… I really missed it.
Not sure why it happened, but my dad blamed it on me always nudging the drive to close it instead of pressing the button.
Haven’t nudged another drive since.
This same thing happened to me a few months ago with my old cd drive. I was installing Diablo 2 expansion and suddenly there was a big POP sound. I opened the drive and there was my game, cracked to pieces. Shame, because I loved that game. Luckily, I had an extra copy of it.
Dude the same thing happened to me except that it happened when I was re-installing windows xp with a lite-on drive. I called them and they said that some discs with microscopic fractures can explode in disk drives spinning at 52x
That is amazing.
Seen this to often, it happend to me but with a front loading dvd drive (the one with just the slot loader) it shot out the front of the drive and just missed my head (well bits of it, and i was sat on the floor at the time)
I would agree that either it was due to the physical properties of the disc or more likely due to some sort of micro-level fracture. The high rpm probably caused more stress on the fracture causing it to crack completely and then break….in turn those pieces probably bounced off the disc as it was spinning causing the rest of the disc to break into pieces.
If they were playing a good game it wouldn’t have happened. Have them play CS or something fun.
@Comfy :: Thanks, we were lucky it didn’t any damage to anyone. Much easier to replace a cheap DVD drive than someone’s eye.
@Geoff :: Lego Island, sounds like a game my kids would probably love given they are Lego nuts. I’ll be telling them to never nudge the drive! 🙂
@Tom :: Sounds almost exactly like our experience, although losing Diablo 2 is worse than losing Reader Rabbit. 😀
@Joshua :: I’m thinking that had to be the case here as the game was kind of old. The drive was a 48x but it was obviously enough.
@Jake :: That is what I thought too.
@bob :: Wow, sounds like you were pretty lucky. If we had something like that I could see my kids trying to turn it into a weapon, lol.
@michaeljohn :: Yeah, I have to imagine that is probably what happened with this cd.
@babaloo :: Lol, I don’t think they are old enough for CS yet but I know what you mean.
Same thing happened to me!
I had a friend who gave me a drive in which a cd exploded. I was able to disassemble it and take out all the small pieces. My drive now, and it works fine (besides the drive tray being broken)
This happened to us at work about 3 or 4 months ago, too. my guess at the time was that the spindle that spins the CD didn’t quite meet up with the hole in the CD, and flexed it til it broke.
I’ve had this happen twice before. Same game too. C&CRA Yuri’s Revenge. Had to use the dvd drive to use the game safely, but then my bro screwed up and put the second copy into the cd drive again, and the end result was the same. No other games or discs did this.
Yuri’s Revenge
______________
Got it’s own back for the first time.
He! He!
i was playing emperor battle for dune it just exploded into hundreds of pieces wierd…
I’ve had this happen too. I had a disc that had a small crack on the bit surrounding the hole, and after enough use, it finally went. Sounded like my PC had been shot, too.
There must be a major issue with exploding CD’s, because some manufacturers have software available that allows users to limit the rotational speed of their drives.
Digg taffic is always fun to see. The jump on alexa is always cool. In the end you should keep a few more readers!
The same sort of thing happened to me with a CD on my
HI – FI. The first CD I ever bought when I was a teenager, just was placing it into my HI – FI and it cracked. Was very cross about it cause it was
exspensive to buy the CD I had bought then and one of my favourite kind of music. Don’t think I bought it again after. We was lied to about CDs been indestructable.
Well if they can make exploding CDs when that happens makes me believe it could be a possible terrorist threat.
Oh not so long ago last month of June 2007 my Computer shot flames out of the cooling vents at the back of my Computer when I flicked a switch whilst it was on, was trying to figure out how to get sound back on when it didn’t let me get sound back on from the normal way on Control Panel. It sparked at me nearly setting my fingers on fire. That made me jumpy whilst trying to do the task on my Computer afterwards and the Monitor went dead after that.
The one I bought my Computer from said it could have been a power surge from my Flat though he wasn’t too sure on that.
I’ve heard of exploding bombs before but this is rediculous.
Just hope CDs don’t fly of the handle into terrorists hands.
… and it wasn’t even a Britney single either!
Perhaps the CD was low quality? Or esle he was playing Reader Rabbit for a realllllly long time 😀
I’m thinking it was the quality of the CD, he hadn’t been playing more than 10 minutes or so when it exploded.
Weird. The exact thing happened to me, same model Dell, but my DVD drive was a Toshiba and it was a HP Printer Install CD
Bill, that’s odd. I’ve got the new drive in there now, another Sony, and I hope it holds up!
Looks like Reader Rabbit’s Thinking Adventures have been ended permanently.
I just had the same thing happen (an hour ago) with my son’s Tonka Construction CD. I thought he had jammed it in but nope, he was waiting for it to launch and it exploded. Destroyed the CD and the drive. Luckily I had a spare. Hour later he’s back to playing other games. Ordered a replacement game on Amazon. Guess it could have been worse!
Kari, you might want to try and contact both the manufacturer of the game and of your computer.
As luck would have it, my post hit digg and caught the attention of someone at Dell. They immediately sent me a replacement DVD drive, although I had already ordered a replacement.
Plus, I contacted the manufacturer of the game and after a little explanation, they sent me a new game – actually two games and one DVD that is a package deal.
Thanks Derek … I would but I basically have nursed this computer along for years. It’s an old IBM 300GL. Doubt anyone would want to help me with that. I salvaged a replacement out of a Compaq my daughter upgraded from. I contacted Atari and Hasbro – they basically blew me off. I did find a replacement game so my son will be happy.
Sorry to hear about their unresponsiveness to the problem. I’m sure my efforts were aided by making the front page of digg and getting some exposure.
BTW, I tried to email you back but it bounced.
I just found your blog because one of my children cdrom game was just detroyed by te dvd drive this morning! So, I am not th only one in this situation but &??&$%* what a mess!
Check out this cool article I found on Matt’s page:
Timeline of being Dugg
Thought of you right away!
d
That is a great article, thanks for passing it along.
HOW THE F*** could that happen? Anyways lol, I hope you get the other pieces out of the drive..
That is so bizzar, I would never have thought that could happen!
Wow… i didn’t know this could happen
I have never seen something like that. I am happy that everyone is alright.
This has happened twice to me. In each case after cleaning all the shards out of the drives and they still worked great. The cd’s, however, not so great…
That is a great article, thanks for passing it along.
How the hell did it happen?
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If I had to guess, the disc must have had some hairline cracks or something – otherwise I have no explanation as to how it happened. 🙂
Is it just coincidence that the two CDs involved were the kids’. Maybe they had got self combusting jam all over the back of them?
Even though you may have already have done this, but could you tell me the name brand of the drive you used so i will know in the future not to buy it?…lol. Seriously though, i’m a gamer and i would go crazy if that was to happen to a game i spend $50 – $60 dollars on.
That’s strange, how come I missed this last month?
I didn’t know reader rabbit was still kicking. I remeber reader rabbit from my amegia days.
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wow 69 posts..must have gone viral
There’s also the case of the microwaved cd
Whoa! How in the world did that happen?? You think it was the drive that caused it or the cd was alrdy damaged which caused it?
How fast was your drive 208X? LOL
It must of been spinning really fast
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o_o I have a lot of Reader Rabbit discs, though that never happened to me. And our computer is dell…
*backs away from computer slowly*
Well I don’t have to worry about it moving too fast-Our computer moves about as slow as an hourglass
Woah! That exact same thing happened to me on my Dell comp. I was playing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego Deluxe Edition. Another educational title – somethings going on there?
Hi there Jimmy, thanks for stopping by to share your experience! Maybe there is some sort of bias against the educational games, lol. 🙂
I can’t believe that even a cd can explode too. I haven’t experience this kind of explosion and I would let my know about this so that they would be aware too. Nice post. Thanks for sharing your pics and your informative article.
That happened to me today. I’m still not sure if the drive works.
Unbelievable I have never seen a disc exploding before. Is this because you leave the cd in the player for long time? I am absolutely clueless as why is this happening?
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I am looking for current real statistics on this happening.
is this happening in 1/1000? 1/10,000? 1/100,000?
what is causing it? how can we prevent it?
I have been told to discard 100’s of DVDs that have tiny cracks in the center.
Your CD must have been cracked already. There is no way that a healthy CD would have exploded under those circumstances. Mythbuster’s tested the exploding CD myth here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6avp29GqXo
I had a CD explode like that a while ago too.
I have seen the Mythbusters episode, too. There is no way a CD drive can spin fast enough to break a CD. So the CDs either had a stress flaw or, people ar lying to get attention, even on the internet. Sad, but hardly unusual.
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As you can see by the pictures above, we clearly had a CD explode in the drive. Now, it is certainly possible that the CD had a crack or flaw in it but it went unnoticed by anyone that was loading the CD into the drive.
That’s happened to me before too; I was installing a game called “silver” (not educational, it’s a pc based rpg) on my younger sister’s computer and the disc shattered in the drive, I had to take it apart to get all the pieces out.
wow. how uninteresting. STUMBLE FAIL. really not an interesting page.
Thanks for sharing your opinion.
I have faced same problem in my office. I shocked. Thank you for sharing your opinion.
I resurrected an old Gateway 310 (added 2 GB of memory) and am just now remembering its peculiarities.
The DVD ROM just goes wild reading some CDs–it sounds like a vacuum cleaner. But the same CD plays fine in the CD/RW drive, and DVDs play fine in the DVD drive.
I think that some DVD drives have a glitch (I’m not enough of an expert to say if it is in the DVD-ROM BIOS or the driver) whereby they attempt to read CDs uncontrollably fast.
To me it has happened too
That happened to me on my old Dell! Guess the CDs are just spinning way too fast.
Self combusting CD’s! Really like the way you’ve modified the thesis theme on your site.
My Windows7 DVD has just exploded in the drive too, never seen anything like it !!
Same thing happened to me once!
Just bought my first copy of COD MW and it sort of exploded!
Luckily it didn’t damage the rest of my computer..
So I know how yoy feel Derek
I just got a Dell and I was playing Duke Nukem 3D and the CD just Explode and man it scared, The computer is still working.
I never had this happen.
I didn’t know that this can happen, hope that this will never happen to me…
well, it just happen to me. i was in the process of burning cd, and then its explode. i turn off the computer, open the cd-drive, the cd shattered into pieces. i think, some pieces still inside ><. its not my computer anyway..
good thing none of those flying pieces hurt you!
I think that some DVD drives have a glitch (I’m not enough of an expert to say if it is in the DVD-ROM BIOS or the driver) whereby they attempt to read CDs uncontrollably fast.
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