The story is slightly unusual because I was actually managing a part of the
engineering group at IBM that was integrating hard disk drives into ThinkPads
during that era. I am not suggesting that it could not have happened or that
it might have occurred at another major laptop manufacturer, but many
details regarding the exact source and nature do not feel quite right. Music was a massive issue. It's just that it became an industry issue a little later as production moved to Taiwan and we were increasing our AD curve.
The issue of music crashing a hard disk drive was a genuine
problem. Since I later specialized in hard drives, I can confirm that every
manufacturer faced this issue as multimedia laptops became more common and
we transitioned to higher areal densities. To state the obvious, we shrank
the tracks every time to achieve larger capacities. We were doubling
capacities every nine to twelve months when we first introduced MR, GMR,
and PMR heads. The hard drive industry employs incredible control theory
experts due to the requirement of keeping a head on track. Personal opinion, which I probably should research, but I believe that one of the densest concentrations of Ph.D.s in leading edge control theory could be found within the hard disk drive industry. Amazing things happen when you're trying to fly nanometers off the disc in a track that is maybe 100 nanometers wide at the time.
By 2010ish, as part of our development suite, we actually played music
through the speakers to identify these types of issues. The origin of
this practice actually came from the ODMs in Taiwan. Therefore, Janet
Jackson was not the standard qualification song we used. Instead, it was
popular hits from the Chinese pop market. There were also
Western songs within the suite, but I remember our team blasting Chinese
pop songs at full volume on multimedia laptops.
Laptop development began moving heavily to Taiwan in the mid nineties. By
the time the early two thousands arrived, there was a massive amount of
competence in Taiwan regarding chassis design engineering. As time
progressed, every American PC company continued to outsource development
to Taiwan and eventually to China. As development was outsourced, the
ODMs would work with suppliers because we wanted to present solutions
to the OEMs that were free of issues.
EDIT: By the way, it wasn't necessarily a blue-screen crash. I'm not saying that that couldn't happen, but generally what we did is we had the throughput test that we were run on the hard drives. Then we would go blast the music full bore and there were certain bandwidth requirements that we needed to get out of the hard disk drive. So to add some more details behind this, I would describe it as a performance issue and the blue screen issue was relatively minor. However, this was a number of years ago and I don't remember the exact percentages.