Since we bought them (myaopen compact boxes like the shuttle) weve had system failures due to (apparently) bad writes to the HD. Windows will basically re-boot, report a serious problem (?) and then go happily on it's way. Generally if you send an error message and click on the "more info" link Microsoft just tells you it a hard drive error and check a few (apparenty) useless things. My take is since these are small form factor boxes it is due to some strange overheat error causing a glitch in the HD bus. Problem w/ that guess is sometimes the error occurred on first boot, so nothing should be very warm. This has been going on for a few years w/ little or no detrimental effects since no info is really stored on them. They are basically just slaves to the network. Win XP Pro will write a minidump and I just mostly monitor the number on a monthy basis. Sometimes it's only a few per month and, rarely, it never happens for a month.
Anyways the question is "is there a way to troubleshoot/fix this situation"?
Anyways the question is "is there a way to troubleshoot/fix this situation"?