I got the dreaded BSOD this afternoon, on my two-month-old Acer netbook with Windows XP.  I am constantly amazed at how fragile Windows is, after being a daily Linux user since 2001, and a Mac user since 2003.  I've never had even close to the same problems on LInux or Mac as I have experienced on Windows.  Between how fragile it is, and having to fend of viruses, worms, spyware, etc. it is a real battle to use it.  None of that applies to Linux or Mac OS X.

 

Windows XP came on this netbook so I decided to keep it and see how Windows is doing these days.  I get a BSOD and then the system restarts after 25 seconds - rinse and repeat.  It says it has an "inaccessible boot device", which I guess is geek speak for the hard drive ;-)

 

I'm running SpinRite on it to see if there are any errors on the disk itself.

 

If so, I'll see if I can't recover it.  If not, I will punt and put Windows 7 on it, after using Knoppix to back up all files to an external USB drive.

 

Good news is that I've been using iDrive to do online backups, and Knoppix works well with NTFS formatted drives that Windows uses.

 

I'll update on what happens next...