Karma or some scary new anti-piracy technique?

Steve Schulze

Well, that was interesting. My brother borrowed my Beatie Boys Liscense to Ill CD to put on his IPod (Not legal, I think he's learned his lesson). He got halfway through ripping the tracks when there was a huge *BANG* from his cd rom drive. The eject button wouldn't work but he eventually managed to pry the tray open to find that the CD had exploded into tiny pieces of kevlar. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen the aftermath with my own eyes. Can only hope that it didn't completely destroy the CDROM drive's insides.

Most bizarre thing ever.

eld

one in a million thing, or rather in a hundred or so.. Happened to me while I had was running systemshock2, a sudden explosion from the cd-drive, and my ss2 cd had exploded into tiny fragments and larger pieces.. There was even smoke!.. but even now the cd-drive works fine..

but alas, my poor ss2cd ;_;..

pogonip

wow never heard of that and ive used 100's of cd;s but I could imagine the drive could cause something like that to happen if it got over heated somehow

thnom

That metallica CD was scary - you put it on your PC and get a virus?! I believe it was metallica..

Seyiji

Then there was the old "What the fuck do you think your doing" from that one Madonna cd.

KDR_11k

A friend of mine once borrowed a CD to a friend of his, a day later that friend came back with the CD shattered into tiny pieces.

CDs tend to spontaneously detonate, you have to live with it if that happens.

thnom: An actual virus? I'd doubt that, putting actually damaging software on a CD can net you lawsuits pretty quickly (no matter what happened or what the user intended to do with the CD, even crashing his PC is causing damage and a felony). Either that was a bootleg or a not so nice way of talking about some malware "CD-driver" that some CDs install that attempts to prevent you from reading the CD directly on your PC. I'm sure a judge would decide in favour of the user if that was brought to court.

Kirin

I believe this attributes to very high-speed cd drives ... say the ones that have a read speed of 52x and higher ... a CD could only handle so much abuse.

Mark Dygert

I agree with Kirin, and it takes very little to make them unstable when they are spinning that fast. I am pretty sure this is why we don't see 120x cdrom drives. I am sure that what ever CD-Rom company that was leading the speed war found out that 52x is about as fast as you can push it. Find the line that everything goes to hell and back it off a notch... that line must be 52x?

Also most ppl are not that kind to thier CD's even if they take care not to scratch them they still twist and bend the holy crap trying to get them out of the case for the first time, which can cause a warped CD. I blame the jewlcase design...

Joshua Stubbles

Kind of funny. There was an episode about this on "Myth Busters", on the History Channel. To break the CD though, they had to add extra power to the ROM, and spin the drive at insanely high speeds. I have no idea what would cause the disks to break at normal rotation speeds though

Gmanx

[ QUOTE ]
Kind of funny. There was an episode about this on "Myth Busters", on the History Channel. To break the CD though, they had to add extra power to the ROM, and spin the drive at insanely high speeds. I have no idea what would cause the disks to break at normal rotation speeds though

[/ QUOTE ]
...a really hot drive could do it. If the CD gets hot when it's in the drive, it cools down when you take it out. Do that a few dozen times, and the CD's going to get brittle.

KDR_11k

I'd appreciate if we'd see CD checks die, that way my drive and the disks would be subjected to much less strain. But then I guess Publishers like exploding CDs.

CheapAlert

OH SHIT I HAVE A 52X AND IT DOESN'T HAVE A TURBO FEATURE EITHER (to slow down to a safe 48x)

Justin Meisse

See if there is a support line to call and get your CD replaced

bearkub

Actually, if I remember correctly, the Beastie Boys 5 To the Burroughs album DID have a virus on the non-US release of the CD. Too bad I don't remember the details...

/EDIT ah! apparently it was bunk! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/16/beastie_boys_not_viral/

monster

Did ever see this video? Funny.

http://www.powerlabs.org/movies/cd.mpg

http://www.powerlabs.org/cdexplode.htm

flaagan

sounds like a job for the Mythbusters!

KeyserSoze

[ QUOTE ]
Kind of funny. There was an episode about this on "Myth Busters", on the History Channel. To break the CD though, they had to add extra power to the ROM, and spin the drive at insanely high speeds. I have no idea what would cause the disks to break at normal rotation speeds though

[/ QUOTE ]

One of the best shows on television. I think the reason they were unable to make a CD explode at the standard 52x speed is because they were using brand-new discs. They did things to them to try to weaken them (put them in the microwave, froze them, etc.), but they were still new discs and it's like a 1:1000 phenomena at that speed. The high-speed camera footage they got when they used the 30,000 RPM was pretty awesome... you could see the disc warping before it exploded.