X31 Serious Error and shutdown. Anybody knows why?

[Thinker]

Hi,

I have an X31 with WinXP SP2, and I am encountering a serious error.
I have connected to the firewire port an external Plextor optical drive
(PX-708UF). The drive was detected right away when plugged into the port, and it read a CD with no problems.

Here's where the fun starts: I then inserted a DVD (Blade Runner, the Director's Cut to be precise), and then a blue screen pops up telling me that Windows is shutting down to prevent damage to my computer. It also says that I should run some RAM diagnostics.
On restart, I have a window which says that Windows recovered from a serious error.

In case it helps, here is the error signature:

BCCCode: 7f BCP1: 00000000 BCP2: 00000000 BCP3: 00000000
BCP4: 00000000 OSVer: 5_1_2600 SP: 2_0 Product: 256_1

I have encountered this problem consistently under the same situation 3 times, after which I ran PCDoctor. I tested the RAM, the CPU, everything.
It didn't encounter any problems. Right now I am running the extended Hard Drive test.

Have you guys encountered some similar situation, and have any idea about what this may mean and the course of action I should take?
I am still within my 30 day return period from IBM, which ends within the next few days. Is this something to be worried about?

Thanks,

Ruben

[Thinker]

I continued testing with different DVD's (data and movie), and I kept having this error about 90% of the time. I finally decided to restore the hard drive to factory settings.

This solved my problem, but now I have lost the WinDVD program, as well as RecordNow and some other utilities. These utilities are not in the IBM Apps folder either, which leads me to believe they were never in the recovery partition, but rather installed in the factory afterwards. In my opinion this is a very poor decision on the part of IBM. Since IBM doesn't ship recovery CDs anymore, at least you would expect them to include everything in the recovery partition...

One more gripe. I had read in the forum that the T42 has a utility which you can access in the BIOS to create recovery CDs. This is not the case in the X31. How am I supposed to upgrade to a newer HD in the future? I am sure there is some convoluted way of doing it, but nothing compares to the convenience of having recovery CDs on hand. Why did IBM stop including recovery CDs anyway? I don't think it is a nice solution for the end user. Perhaps it has to do with some licensing issues with Microsoft, or maybe they were able to get a price break from them by doing this. I don't know the reason why they decided to go this route. I only know it sucks.

Ruben