Hard reset - will it kill off my new harddisk?

My old laptop has some error in its ram, because it's still PIII, I couldnt find any sdram to replace it. I couldnt afford to buy new laptop either, so I guess I have no choice but to live with this one till I get decent job.

Anyway, problem comes when my winxp got too much BSOD these days, and forcing me to always use the hard reset button. I know this could potentially damage my harddisk, even though speedfan analyzed my harddrive having 96% fitness, I'm still worried. I'm worried that my data (mostly mp3) would be corrupted. It's most unlikely the hdd will fail soon, but it's very annoying to find your random mp3s getting corrupted unexpectedly.

In condition to prevent further damage from hard reset, what should I do after I hard reset my laptop? Must I wait some seconds before I turn it on again, or must I turn it again immediately? Any help would be appreciated.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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And yes, you should wait to a count of ten I have heard. I am GUESSING that the electronics inside need to lose their charge. Probably when you first turn it on, there is little to no charge inside. It then is fully charged for a second when it gets a sudden rush of power (the initial turn on), but then subsides to 'normal' levels after it gets a continual source of power. However, if you turn it off, and then right back on, it has not gotten rid of the power it originally had AND has to deal with a full rush of power, possibly leading to 'overflow'. Now, this is just a GUESS of what is going on inside, someone with a better understanding of this can probably describe it better.

I backup my files periodically but I just want to ensure about this one actually. Thanks for the tips guys!

There's nowhere I can't reach.

sorry to bump, but I would like to ask whether it's possible to diagnose the bad part of the ram with certain software. I want to use memtest86, but it seems only testing the ram, and doesnt provide much solution because the bad part would probably still used by the pc.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I just used it, and wow, I'm surprised, there are about 3000 or more errors in my ram. Since my laptop couldnt use ddr, I have no choice but to stick with this till I could afford new laptop. ;_;

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Or try to put the faulty memory in the slot which results in the highest linear address and then limit the RAM used by Windows. At least this should be possible by passing boot parameters to the kernel.

to be honest I'm confused what you meant with this, I'm totally noob for this stuff, is there any good tutorial to show me how to do this?

thanks in advance liquidacid. Now I want to try seagate seatools, I hope this hdd not broken already, because just today, I hard reset it about... 6 times or more (these bsod keep coming, sigh)

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?