crash and burn

Laptop just crashed this weekend.

Had it running a decent size Matlab program over Friday night, Came in Saturday morning and it was constantly restarting, attempting to find a boot CD or a network boot command. Attempted to reboot into Windows. Failed. Attempted to run Windows in Safe mode. Failed.

Thank goodness for Knoppix. Managed to access all my files on the hard drive and ship them off on a USB key.

Finally managed to boot into Windows safe mode. Ran chkdsk to see if there were problems with the disk. Everything was fine... until it froze on me. Rebooted. Got the blue screen of death! with error code 0xF4 (which means "Critical Object Termination"). Google searched on that and found out it's a very BAD thing. Also wasn't pleased to find that many other Toshiba owners have experienced it too, and were less than happy with the support offered from the company.

Two days later I finally managed to re=install the original image of the software that came with the machine, after 6 tries (kept freezing). Now I have to try and diagnose if there's anything still wrong with the machine. I'm hopeful it is not a hardware issue.

r.