It appears my hard disk is slowly dying. This morning I’ve installed a couple of updates (Mercurial, Java, NetBeans et al). NetBeans was the last on the list when somewhere in the middle of the installer, my notebook suddenly crashed with a bluescreen!
I’ve had this a couple of months ago, too, when I was updating Cygwin. From the post mortem analysis I figured that the bluescreen was blamed on an unknown driver - but I hadn’t installed any drivers since ages! Yet I booted to Safe Mode and disabled each and every driver that wasn’t absolutely necessary. I then retried the Cygwin update but it crashed my notebook at exactly the same stage. I repeated this several times until I blamed it on Cygwin and gave up on it (Can you believe what a mess it is to step back from using fancy bash/Cygwin to plain cmd/Windows? I can tell it’s terrible!).
So today it was NetBeans. I repeated the installation and it succeeded, but then I got bluescreens every now and then when performing I/O intensive tasks, for example when running the TrueZIP integration tests. So blaming it on an unknown driver may have been wrong. I ran chkdsk and it found and fixed some file system errors. I hoped all is well now but I was wrong again - I still got crashes when doing I/O. So now I’m sitting in front of my notebook and waiting for it to complete a scan for bad sectors (using chkdsk again). It seems this will last for the rest of the day and I’m not even sure it will help at all.
The only good thing about it is that I finally have some time to read a nice book on my fellow iPad - where I’ m currently typing this message.