My Windows XP CD shattered in the drive!

I've just installed my new Raptor drive.

When I was installing XP on it, the CD shattered into 100s of pieces whilst the installation program was running!

Could it be possible that modern CD drives spin too fast for some older CDs to handle?

Perhaps the plastic has also aged a bit and have become brittle?

The CD looked perfectly fine before I put it in the drive though.

Fortunately I managed to get all the shattered pieces of plastic out of the drive and it still works but I'm annoyed about not having a CD now. I'll ask my brother if he has an old XP CD, failing that I'll download one from Pirate Bay. I'm certainly not going to buy a new one and I'm well within my rights to obtain a copy because I have the licence to use it.

I know I should've copied it so I had a backup but I thought keeping it in a safe place was good enough to protect it, oh well, live and learn.

Contact your PC manufacture for a new CD. I was able to get one for my Sony just by going on thier website and entering the product key.

I could have a go, but I'm not too hopeful as, unfortunately it's not a large computer store but a small local shop and the computer is six years old so its warranty has long expired.

From Wikipedia:

A disc shatters when it fails to support the centripetal force required to keep all parts of the disc moving circularly. The velocity of the edge of a 120 mm disc rotating at 10,350 RPM is approximately 65 m/s. (234.1 km/h, 145.5 mph) To remain in circular motion about the spindle, the disc edge accelerates at about 7,200 G. The force causing this acceleration is transmitted through the disc itself and is balanced by an opposite force on the other side of the disc. Thus, a disc begins to fail when it can not handle these forces, and a failing disc can then completely shatter due to the imbalance of forces around the disc.

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So if you have a drive that can spin up to speeds above ~48x, it can literally rip your CDs apart with centrifugal force!

Slower drives can still do this if there is even the tinyest of cracks anywhere in the cd.

It's a 52x speed drive which explains that.

Silly question but is it possible to reduce the speed when I'm using discs I don't want to risk busting?

I'm probably better off just backing everything up.

If your disc shattered then it was damaged, CDROM speeds haven't changed for years and years now, and certainly aren't fast enough to damage a CD.

Well the CD hardly had a scratch on it and I haven't had any problems reading it before, it seems plausible a very tiny hairline fracture could've weakened it.

Well if the Wikipedia article is correct, I have no problem believing the CD could have been broken by the drive.
I mean, 7200 G's at the edge of the disk?!?

Here's a great little freeware utility that should be able to set your drive to read / write slower:

Drivespeed

I have downloaded it and tried it out. It works great for me! (I did scan it first - clean.)
My CD/DVD drive usually sounds like a VACUUM when I'm ripping something!!! (It is going like 52x speed...)

I'll look into it but I don't think that could've helped me because I couldn't have installed it before installing Windows.

I need a way to set it without relying on the OS, i.e. through the BIOS or a jumper somewhere inside the PC which doesn't seem very likely.

The Wikipedia article is right but it states that the forces normally balance because of the uniform weight distribution around the disc. It's when the disc isn't so uniform that problems with shattering can occur. Unfortunately at that speed it seems like a relatively minor imbalance can be fatal to the CD.

Might be a good time to upgrade to Windows 7, XP is 10yrs old now.

Don't be silly

blueroomelectronics said:

Might be a good time to upgrade to Windows 7, XP is 10yrs old now.

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Why would I want to upgrade to Windows 7?

So my PC will run at half the speed?

If I wanted to do that, I'd go back to using my old PC which has 512MB of RAM.

Ahh RAM, yes Windows 7 needs about 2G. It can manage it's resources better than XP and in many ways seems the same speed if not faster than XP.

Where did you hear that from? The Microsoft website?

It might be faster than Vista but I doubt it's faster than XP.

By the way XP is under 2 years old, the last major update was SP3 and it still receives minor fixes every month via update.

I will probably get Windows 7 when this machine breaks and I need a new computer. I don't see why I should pay for the extortionate price for a retail copy, especially when I already have the licence for XP on my machine.

My brother of one of his friends might have a legitimate version of XP I can install, otherwise I'll download it.

can you believe..... I HAD THE SAME EXPIRIENCE , about 4 years back, when i bought a P.C...
I thought it was due to me placing the C.D wrongly..!

Since you're doing a fresh install why not download the trial version 30days of Windows 7 and give it a try. It's a nice OS and is not the awful Vista. It won't take long before XP drivers are no longer updated.

After hearing this, I'm scared, because I've been keeping a copy of Xp without making any scratch and all(of course I won't give to anybody else) .

transistor495,
I strongly advise making a backup copy of your XP disc.

And use the speed reducing software when copying, just in case.

blueroomelectronics said:

Since you're doing a fresh install why not download the trial version 30days of Windows 7 and give it a try. It's a nice OS and is not the awful Vista. It won't take long before XP drivers are no longer updated.

Click to expand...

For three reasons:

1) My machine only has 1GB RAM and I see no point in upgrading it.

2) I reckon new XP drivers will be written for new hardware for at least the next five years, maybe not for internal hardware such as motherboards but scanners and printers certainly will. Heck some of the stuff I've recently bought has drivers for Windows 2000.

3) I'm moving away from Windows and towards Linux.

By the way, in my experience Windows isn't always any easier to use than Linux. For example, when installing XP, the set up program asked me whether I wanted to repair the installation on drive C or drive D which confused the hell out of me because according to My Computer drive D is the CD-ROM drive! I didn't know which drive was which so I disconnected the drive I didn't want to install on, rebooted, then installed XP.

When I set up Fedora Linux, the set up program gave me the make, model and serial numbers of my hard drives and asked me which I wanted to partition, so I could clearly see which is which.

The initial Windows XP set up screen was a blue text mode screen that didn't look too much different from the MS-DOS 6.0 setup screen.

The initial Fedora Linux set up screen was graphical and looked modern.

I really hope things have improved with Windows 7, if the set up program is as confusing then I don't think I'll even bother installing it.

The setup is a breeze. Much better than XP.

Also unlike XP it supports ACHI (set it in your BIOS before installing) for your Raptor drive.

I visited the store where I go the PC from and told them about the XP disc and they said they'll send me one for free which I'm really happy about.

The shop was Power Computing in Kempston, Bedfordshire, UK, here's a link to the site.
Custom PC, Gaming PC, Workstation, Motherboard, Laptop, Power Computing | Home Page

It's probably not the cheapest place but I'm happy with the service. I bought a new wide screen monitor whilst I was there. The old monitor had given up the ghost - I'll take it to bits tomorrow to see if there's anything worth salvaging.

What did the actual shattering actually sound like?

Just curious