Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) at Windows XP startup – a classic!

A friend of mine had a scary one yesterday: when a video card goes out a new Toshiba laptop (oh, those Toshibas!), you take it in or ship it out for the warranty repair. And, by the way, it’s always good to pull the hard drive out or at least make a backup, as they will likely wipe it clean “just in case”, even if they’re only replacing the keyboard. And this time, they did have to replace the keyboard, indeed – scary to even think of the design of this gizmo. So imagine: a black Toshiba with silver macbook-like keyboard. One of a kind, I tell you! Well, you put the hard drive back in, turn it on and it begins to boot up but then, two seconds into the startup it flashes blue and restarts and so on till the second coming. It’s almost a classic by now, if you have a newer PC (applies to both laptops and desktops) running Windows XP: you have to set your sATA controller to run in compatibility mode, as opposed to AHCI, which is the default for most computers these days. Otherwise, you can’t even install XP. Sure enough, they had to wipe the BIOS, as well…