I discovered something interesting this weekend about the
relative stability of Windows and Linux when my son's computer
developed a dying hard drive (as reported by the Maxtor test
software and the bios hard drive test). Under Windows, this
Dell Dimension 4700 with sata drive would suffer a blue screen
of death after about 30 minutes of usage. Since nothing
essential was on the drive, I wiped it and tried reinstalling
windows with the same result. So at this point I installed Fedora
Core 4. I have been running the system with Fedora Core 4 all weekend
long now without a single glitch despite the hard drive problems.
Rather impressive.
Jack
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Do not get carried away. I have seen linux to be more fragile in my
case. I had a hard-disk with some bad sectors and linux would crash
like anything. I installed windowsXP just for fun and it did not crash
at all. I saw that it had detected the bad sector (it was logged in
event-viewer).
You might have been just lucky that linux has not tried to write data
in that bad area.
OR, your drive could have auto-remapped the bad sectors (many drives
do this) and thus getting rid of this problem for some time.
VJ