This is the third time in as many months.  I woke up this morning and when I went to pack my Acer Aspire 150 netbook to take to work, it was sitting at the CMOS setup screen.  Uh-oh, never a good sign.  So I figured it must have crashed and for some reason stopped here, which was weird. Not to dwell on it, I rebooted and was not pleasantly surprised when it came up to the setup screen again.  Reboot.  Same thing.  Then I noticed that the setup screen listed NO HARD DRIVE.

 

Ouch!

 

Ok so I powered it off and took it to work.

 

I'm here now and I tried to start it up.  Now it sees the hard drive, and Windows tries to start, but then crashes.  It flashes a blue screen dump and then reboots.  Like too fast to read what is says.  Thanks, Microsoft. Now I'm running Spinrite on it and it has already found a bad sector, and it is banging away trying to recover it. When I'm done I am going to punt and put Windows 7 RC on it (out today).  First though, I'll back it all up using a Knoppix Live Linux CD, writing the backup to an external drive.

 

I was amused at Apple calling the netbooks junk, but I'm starting to wonder.  Mine doesn't seem so good, if I get three hard drive problems in four months of buying it.Oh, and I've made up my mind about the online backups - they're too slow.  I've been running one non-stop for a week while the computer was on, and it isn't even half way done.  And I have a 10Mbps connection at the office.  So old-fashioned disk-to-disk backups are going to do it for me.

 

Stay tuned for results.