i know this is the 'photos for fun' section but this is not so fun!

so I'm searching through some old cd's of pics and half way through I hear this loud bang like a gun! You would not believe it but my brand new Dell Computer CD Rom explodes and fragments one of my photo cd's to smithereens! Crap flying all over the office...I can't believe it :mad:

Anywho's I took some pics of the rather strange occurance and thought I'd share...guess i'll just have to wait to hear what tech support has to say...bummer :( at least it wasn't the farcry cd...

http://www.anitrone.com/misc/one.jpg

http://www.anitrone.com/misc/two.jpg

http://www.anitrone.com/misc/three.jpg

http://www.anitrone.com/misc/four.jpg

if you can open the case without voiding your warranty, you should, just so you can look at the cd-rom housing. i bet it dented and protruding on the sides. that sucks though. hopefully, it shouldnt' cause any major problems. you should only have to replace the drive and be back in bid'ness.

oh, that's the reason why cd drives never went past 52x...that seems to be the magic number in terms of cds exploding in the drive. when you get them to send you a new drive, see if they'll put a slower one it, like a 40-48x. also, i think i remember seeing a program that controls the spin speed. might be worth looking for, and limiting the speed of older disks or unbalanced disks to 12x or lower.

Yeah, I've heard of this thing before. Old disk with a tiny crack or something. It's only made for 12x but suddenly gets to 52x and can't play the game.

Wow!...thats so sad to hear.....and the photo's tell a thousand words...
You should be compensated from Dell, as these photos are not too good for thier Image....I hope it works out for you...

Sorry about that.
Buddy of mine had this happen as well.

Also, if you have Discovery Chanel, there's the show called Myth Busters and they did the test on this but were not able to replicate it with regular drive.
Instead they've use some industrial strenght motor.

lol...they can call it a myth all they want, but for the people that it happened too, well, they know somethings are hard to replicate in the lab ;)

well, just got off the phone with tech support, their shipping a new one out...maybe I'll have better luck with the replacement. I opened the unit and it seems to have not caused damage past the cdrom...tech support had never seen anything like this either so they were quite baffled when they saw the pics...at least you guys gave me some explanation in regards to this strange phenomenom :)

thanks mucho!

Thats great news.....thanks for keeping us all up to date..

rotational momentum is a b**** :D
hope your new drive fares better with older cds :grin2:

Damn that sucks hardcore...it's a good thing no one got their eye poked out..

ani: did they actually ship you a new drive, or have I understood this incorrectly? Seems weard, as this is more the fault of the company making the cds as it is of the manufacturers of the device...

I just blew up my Lite-on SOHW-812S, cleaned out the shrapnel, but it's not working anymore... :(

wow, i'd forgotten about this. but yeah they did...my computer was still under warranty with dell though. hope you get this resolved cause it sucks butt!