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Yesterday, I arrived home at 7pm to find my PC had restarted itself. It was caught in a vicious cycle where it would try to reboot, work its way through the error report screen, wait the necessary 30 seconds, fire up Windows and work through the splash screen and eventually arrive at a point where it realises that there is a fault with Windows, and the routine repeats itself. If it wasn’t for the fact that it was happening to MY computer, I would have found it funny. But unfortunately for me, my PC had indeed contracted the dreaded Blue Screen of Death!

For those Windows users out there who have absolutely no idea what this is and have never experienced or witnessed its occurance, then congratulations, for you are one of the few lucky ones. If you are curious as to what all this fuss is about over the Blue Screen of Death (lovingly shortened to BSoD), you can head on over to Answers.com where they’ve compiled a list of definitions gathered from various sources. As for myself, I haven’t seen this phenomenon for a while now, ever since switching over to the more stable Windows 2000 (or Win2k for short), and then later to Windows XP.

A simple definition would be Windows is (or close to) experiencing, what my boss likes to term as, an irreconcilable mess. In layman terms, it means that, once again, Windows has screwed up. BSoDs have been around for the longest time, ever since Windows 3.1 was launched way back when.

But back to my case of the cycling BSoD. There really wasn’t much that could be done to save the Windows installation. I went into safe mode and did some tinkering in hopes of reviving the dead but it was all in vain. Everytime a reboot to Windows normal mode is made, the BSoD shows its ugly mug. I suspect that the problem could probably be sourced to some bad sectors on my hard disk. But the prospect of tinkering with the settings and trying to get Windows to behave wasn’t very appealing to me. And so, I decided to fall back and break out the trusty Windows boot disk.

Fortunately for me, I have made it a habit of partitioning my drive (a habit from long ago when Windows did not recognise large disk drives and access speeds were slow). Most of my important documents were already stored on the spare partition. About 20 minutes in safe mode was all I needed to round up and move the stragglers to safety. Once that was done, a quick reboot and I was seeing the ‘Blue Screen of Life’ @ the Windows installation screen.

An hour later and I was back online and surfing the net. Not exactly painless but at least it didn’t take too long. Not everything is installed and up to speed yet but that’s really no concern. The main thing is that all that needs to be saved is safe and life goes on.

So, piece of advice: always partition your drives and back up your important files (preferably to some backup media other than your harddisk). You never know when (god forbid) your harddisk will crash. Just know that it will. It is an eventuality, not a possibility.