WTH happened to my computer disc player?

Maybe a power surge. Rip DVD player.

Looks like the disc exploded from either spinning too fast, or more likely a defective or cracked disc that came apart.

What I don’t understand is why it even fired up in the first place.

There are a lot of reasons why it could get fired up without you manually making it. Maybe there was a scheduled windows maintenance task or some such thing…. although.. that in no way explains why it decided to blow up. Wow… I’ve never seen that one before. Hopefully it wasn’t a valuable disc??!

Well…it was probably a picture disc. More valuable than, say….any other disc in the world. Or maybe it was just a music disc, like songs I’ve burned.

It was weird. It just fired up and….exploded.

I could understand if it was one of the older operating systems that, when you started it up, it sensed a disc in, and it would flag you asking if it was a program disc, and then won’t let you start the computer until you remove it, but they don’t do that any more.

That is what happens when a cracked disc is spun at high speed though. It’s also why 48x is the fastest CD drives generally go; the 52x drives occasionally shatter even undamaged discs. Even a crack too small to see will grow large and spidery enough to shatter the disc at high RPM. A speed of 10,000 RPM is not uncommon in optical drives, which is high enough to go boom.

As for why it started up, there are many tasks that involve “polling” the drives to see what is there. May have been just checking to see if the disc is saw in the tray was the one it remembered having in the tray; while you and I may assume it is the same disc if the drive hasn’t been opened in a while, computers aren’t always that smart or trusting. It goes to check, spins the drive, and BANG!

Newer computers will often skip over non-system discs and go down the listed boot order configured in the BIOS until it either finds something it can boot or goes through the whole list. Like many, mine checks the USB ports and optical drive before trying to boot from my hard drive. If the USB ports are empty and there is a non-bootable CD/DVD in my tray, it will just ignore it and go for the third item on the list (my hard drive) and boot from there.

Thanks Jerv. That makes sense….is my drive toast you think?

Maybe, maybe not. It depends on luck.

@Dutchess_III some will probably frown on this but I would kill all the power to the PC then carefully vacuum out what you can then reboot it and see if it will run.

Had a disk shatter in my drive once as well.
Got out all the pieces, and it continued to work afterwards.
For a while. At some point the drive was dead.

Problem fixed. I ran it to the computer guy and watched carefully as he pulled the drive out and put a new one in. Piece of cake, took about 3 minutes and I know how to do it now.
New drive was $40. Labor was $20, but I chalk it up to an inexpensive crash computer course.

^^^ PUN intended ? ?

Yeah! I saw it too before I posted. ;)