It’s Dead Jim #4

OK, I know I said I’d eulogize my dead hard drive, but something else has taken precidence. My laptop crashed. It was Monday, I was working and all of a sudden the Blue Screen of Death popped up. Since then, I can’t login without a BSOD. So I booted to the recovery consolue, ran chkdsk which found and fixed problems and reinstalled Windows, and I got the same thing. I booted with Knoppix and tried to backup my data but I keep getting disk I/O errors. So I thought I had another bad HDD. I tested it with PC-Check and it seems OK. So I’m assuming there’s something seriously wrong with the file system. Im trying to decide if I have any data I really care about. Since I have three computers I use regularly, most things I really need are in more than one place. So I’m looking at a format and reload. But I am debating what OS to use. Do I really want to go back to Windows? I’m posting this from Knoppix at the moment. I’d like to go strictly with BSD, but my laptop uses a Broadcom NIC and wireless card and OpenBSD won’t support Broadcom because of their close source policy. I have an Orinoco wireless card that works fine, and a Netgear PCMCIA NIC I can use, but I’d like to be able to use what’s built-in. So I’ll probably go with a Linux distro. Linux supports my Broadcom NIC and I may be able to get ndiswrapper to load drivers for my wireless, so I suppose Linux it’ll be. The question is what distro should I try? I’ll take any suggestions.