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Accidentally inserted spacer disc in drive with DVD.Damage?

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Accidentally inserted spacer disc in drive with DVD.Damage?

Postby Feu on Sun Jul 30, 2006 8:36 pm

It turns out that when I got to the last disc in my Verbatim DVD+R DL 10 disc spindle, I accidentally grabbed not only the blank DVD but also the thin (much thinner than in other spindles) transparent protective insert / spacer that is at the bottom of most spindles.

I heard a brief, but unusual noise (like a disc spinning on another one and /or the drive trying to grab the disc(s) from my drive (hadn't started burning) right after inserting what I thought was just the blank disc.
I decided to eject it, only to find, when lifting the blank out of the tray, that the thin trasnparent plastic spacer was underneath the DVD+R DL disc.

The drive seems to be burning all right (burn has not completed yet), but I want to know if any damage could have occurred to the drive mechanism, or at least how to check it?
I mean just because burns work doesn't necessarily mean that nothing happened.
Does anyone know enough about the mechanics and internals of CD / DVD burners to know whether I should worry about this or not (i.e. whether anything would typically be damaged or not).

Thanks!

PS: If the insert had been thicker like old ones, I probably would have noticed the mistake before inserting the disc(s) into the burner.

Anyone else done this?

Thanks!
Last edited by Feu on Mon Aug 14, 2006 10:50 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby Ian on Sun Jul 30, 2006 9:20 pm

I've done this a few times with the spacer and with a second disc. It didn't seem to damage any of the drives I did it with.
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Postby dolphinius_rex on Sun Jul 30, 2006 10:03 pm

Ian wrote:I've done this a few times with the spacer and with a second disc. It didn't seem to damage any of the drives I did it with.


Ditto, I've done it once or twice by mistake, and I've never noticed any problems with the drive afterwards. It's not something I would recommend or suggest trying, but I think the chances of causing catastrophic hardware failure are pretty slim :)
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Postby Feu on Sun Jul 30, 2006 10:18 pm

Thanks for the feedback, Ian and dolphinius!
It certainly makes me feel better.

Update:
The burn completed without issues and the burned DVD did play properly.

The burner is only one week old, so I wasn't thrilled when I heard the noise when closing the tray and then again (perhaps a slightly different noise) when opening it.

I guess I worry too much...
I was concerned that something in the locking mechanism could have suffered damage or misalignment while locking the two "discs" (instead of the usual one [disc]); testing the disc with a DVD scanning utility should quickly alleviate those concerns.
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Postby Dartman on Sun Jul 30, 2006 11:30 pm

I've done it before too, makes a hellacious noise but doesn't seem to do any damage here either. I've also done it with my dvd players when I forget to double check the tray.
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Postby Feu on Mon Jul 31, 2006 1:25 am

Thanks Dartman.
I guess the consensus (4 - 0) is that it doesn't seem to hurt.

If I knew more about the internals, I would know exactly what happens inside the drive mechanism (specifically the part that grabs the disc) when the thicker than usual media is inserted.
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Postby Dartman on Mon Jul 31, 2006 1:34 am

I think the clamp gets overloaded a bit and the motor trys to spin up 2 disks at once so they spin on top of each other and make the noise, and get scratched badly sometimes.
Pop open a dead drive sometime and check it out, pretty informative just to see how it all goes together.
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Postby stix on Tue Aug 01, 2006 12:06 am

I accidentally put a blank DVD, with one of the foam spacers on top, into one of my burners awhile back. It was the top-most DVD in a new cake box. I thought I had removed all the spacers, and didn't notice there was one remaining. It made some awful sounds, and I had a hard time getting the DVD out, like it didn't want to give it up. The spacer came out easy. There was a little bit of material that had scraped off of the center hole in the disk, like the top edge had a bevel.

Amazingly , the drive still works great. I have since opened it and cleaned out the debris.
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