I was a bit skeptical about this to start with, but according to a respected cd-rom drive manufacturer, if you put a cracked CD in your cd-rom drive, the disc could explode and shatter, or even be expelled out the front of the drive.

That sounds rather dubious >_> yes the disk will shatter but eject out the front at high speed? that souds silly, the tray would need to be commanded to open, and no CDROM/DVD drive opens on its own without a command as a part of a program or manual button press o_o

Looks like this is a fact. I did a search in google and came up with several pages each explaining the hazards of using cracked CD-ROM's. I think it would be a good idea to check CD-ROM's before using them.


This is how a cracked CD looks...

That's happned to a friend of mine.

hmmm, a non-cracked cd will explode if spun fast enough:)
I had an interesting video of people spinning CD's on those little dremmel ( i think thats what they are called) things.

Maybe if the CD drive is one of those open face drives? shards of cd may be ejected?

I have had some CD's self destruct in my drive; but they did not explode. They only explode when I use them as Clay Pigeons

I just saw an episode of Myth Busters about this the other day. It was interesting to watch.

Myth Busters?

I had my FrontPage 2000 disc explode during installation.........I had previously installed 2 other programs before this installation. When the disc exploded it sounded like a gun going off. I was totally surprised to see fragments of my disc laying on the floor and and other pieces lodged in the "closed drive door"! It can happen folks, so please have your computer face away from you and make sure small kids are not near the computer while running cd's or dvd's in your computer, it can do physcial harm. I have a HP Pavilion 8860. I am not a fan of Hewlett Packard...I've had to replace my harddrive, my CD burner (due to the damage my disc that exploded) and installed a dual cooling fan to "hopefully" keep my unit running cooler.