I eat CDs for breakfast.
 

So...

today, while burning music to my hard drive from CD as you do, a extreme load Crack/Bang from the vicinity of my ageing PC.

Due to the sound, I imagined that it would shut down in a matter of seconds, due to some catastrophic failure in its workings, which If I am honest, I have been expecting for quite some time, but lo and behold, it survived the initial impact.

i went to investigate the disk tray, pressed eject, only for it to jam, where upon I prised the tray open with my fingers.

In the aftermath of the event that the gremlins in my PC know only as "le crack massive"(yes these are french gremlins), what had happened quickly became apparent.

The tray slid out, with multiple large fragments of disc resting on the small sill. After collecting these fragments, and doing a headcount,
http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h1...Picture109.jpg
I discovered that at least a 1/4 of the disc was....

....Still inside my PC!

Time to launch the rescue! After collecting the shards scattered around the front of the drive, I noticed that there were shards at the back which i could reach, to counter act this, I deployed the secret weapon!.

Picking up the case, in both hands, and turning it upside down, while making sure the disc drive was open, the shaking commenced.
And, much to my delight, the yield of shards was great.
But my delight was tinged with despair, as on further examination, there were few precious shards left behind!

Time to use all my power to summon the great, mighty all powerful,
Kebab stick!

I could feel the awesome power of the metal kebab stick flow through my fingers as I probed deeper into the drive.
Using the mighty tool I managed to dislodge and extract a few more shards. With one last mighty shake, the remaining particles left the tray, and dropped on the floor.

My work was done.
leave no shard (man) behind!

Well after that long winded story of how a random CD exploded in my DVD drive for no apparent reason, I have a question to ask, has that ever happened to you?

The end result, Its more or less there, and I don't have the patience to put it back together again.
http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h1...Picture110.jpg

Maybe the RIAA has invented a CD that self-destructs when placed in a computer CD-ROM or -RW drive.;)

Or they made a contribution to the Vatican to pray for G-d to smite the CD's of people who are pirating (their definition of exercising fair use) discs.

Seriously though, I didn't think CD drives spun any faster than CD players. Am I wrong?

I blame the fact that its a freebie myself, although this isn't a really good explanation, since I may add that I burned 2 songs off it before it exploded, and there was no fore warning when it did crack, and also the disc wasn't even hurt when it came out of the drive.

a mystery.

bonus points to the person who can tell me where the freebie came from.

I don't know. Do whorehouses give door prizes?:D

The Daily Mail actually, but close enough :P

When I worked for a computer manufacturer as a technician, I use to have a picture of a tower with shards of cd sticking out of it from a phone call where a client told me the computer had "exploded." She took a picture and sent it to me as evidence. Apparently, the CD got knocked off balance while spinning and with the force of the spin (centrifugal? centripetal? I don't remember which is which) the cd broke into a bunch of pieces and lodged itself in the pc, sticking out in all directions. It was a good conversation piece, so I left it taped up at my desk for 3 years, at least.

Unless it takes you 60-70 minutes to copy a CD or rip it to your HD, I'd have to say that CD drives do, indeed, spin faster than a CD player. :)

Weren't you worried about sticking a metal object into your computer guts and possibly shorting out the chips?