It should have been obvious to me, but wasn't. My daughter brought home from school a commercial CD with a small crack that extended from the hub maybe 20mm into the disk. She had told her friend that her dad could fix anything when it came to CDs. I figured that the crack would only affect the first track or two, and that maybe the built-in CD error concealment would mask the defect if I transferred the contents to a new disk.

I loaded the CD, then asked Vegas to rip the songs to the timeline. The disk spun up for a few seconds, followed by a very impressive "BAM!" as the CD disintegrated inside the drive. It sounded as though someone hit the side of the PC with a ball-peen hammer.

I pulled the drive out of the box, removed the top and bottom covers, and found about half the disk intact, but the other half was in slivers no larger than a fingernail. After cleaning the burner out and reinstalling, I discovered that the disk tray would load and the laser sled assembly still worked, but the drive motor had left for the hereafter. I suspect the exploding disk jammed the motor to a sudden stop and did something to the motor innards.

In any event, I found the same CD burner on sale today at Fry's for $25, so it was a relatively inexpensive lesson.

I realize now that I could have had Vegas read the disk at a much lower speed. There is a drop-down menu for that purpose on the CD rip screen.

Anyway, treat any disk with a crack in it with suspicion. At 52x, these things really spin.