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I had a problem on my laptop yesterday; Windows XP Home Edition crashed. I believe the main problem was that the hard drive was full. On booting, the nice BSOD came up. I also had a Windows 2000 professional installed on the same machine, and it crashed too with the same colored window.

Since XP home edition only came with the recovery CD, the only solution I could have followed was to format my hard-drive and rebuild the entire system. Getting back to day 1 was however not the desired fix for me.

Since I had only the preinstalled XP home edition CD, which as already said, wipes out everything, it seems that there was no-go for any other type of solution. However, a quick google search revealed a great tool: a Windows live CD called BartPE. This tool, combined with the Windows XP recovery CD created a bootable Windows CD that allowed me to clean up some disk space. I created this disk on my main workstation, then used it to boot the laptop. XP continues to give the blue screens, but I was able to back up what I still needed from the laptop to an external hard-drive. I was too lazy to use the network, which this live CD installs too. Next step is a clean XP re-install, but at least I have all my files backed up.