Myth Confirmed: Bad CDs can shatter inside drive!
There was an old episode of Mythbusters (too lazy too lookup which) where those lovable curious personnel tested the myth of CDs shattering inside high-speed CD drive - they had to make special cd-spinning rig to test it, but in the end they managed to shatter a disc just by spinning it at high speed.
Well, mine is a run-of-the-mill LG 16x DVD RW drive, but yesterday I have just achieved the same feat (not that I am proud of it!) with an old cd from my collection. I inserted the damned cd and browsed its contents for a few minutes when a loud ‘pop!’ sounded - and the poor drive stopped working! With the particular Mythbusters episode in my terrified mind I immediately tried to eject the disc - to no avail (Later I found out a piece of the shattered CD blocking the drive’s eject mechanism). Hence I spent the better part of the night disassembling the drive (and voiding its warranty, but don’t tell the distributor that 
and removing all the pieces of the shattered cd, which fortunately gets the thing back to work.
Today though, tired from doing all that after the tiresome task of helping with a colleague’s marriage, I’m down with throat inflammation ^_^;
Lessons learned:
1. Don’t buy crap CDs! Buy only brand name, high quality stuff or prepare to suffer the consequences!
2. If you already have one with data in it, copy the data somewhere else and dump the thing before it explodes inside your new high-speed drive ^_^;
3. Watch Mythbusters! It actually gives you practical knowledge ^_^;
