Ok, About a week or two ago I was minding my own business on the computer, doing what I usually do, listen to music, talk to people, dream hop on Furcadia, talk to people on there. (which is a Multi-User Chat Kingdom or MUCK)...
All the sudden, my web browser, Firefox, locks up and I'm like "what the <censored>?" I closed it and all the sudden everything is shot to <censored>. The blue screen of doom that says "Memory dump" showed up for about 3 seconds, and then disappeared and the computer rebooted itself. When it was done booting, and windows XP was on it's way to loading, it would stick at the loading screen, or ask for a booting media. I really don't know how on earth this happened... I did nothing to get a virus, and nothing at all to modify the hard drive in any way... Just for the record, my hard drive (as well as the motherboard, video card, and power supply) was brand spankin' new.
This is the weird part. Sector Zero, which basically runs the whole damned hard drive, was NUKED OUT completely. So I had basically no booting media because it was gone. I had not downloaded anything malicious, nor have I been to any sites that could have attacked my computer. (If I can recall correctly, I was going to dictionary.com when it had happened. But that doesn't have anything to do with it because I go to dictionary.com often)
After a few days of trying, I buckled in and just bought a new hard drive.... I think this is very interesting because it was just sudden.
What do you think?
How did this happen?
Could my brand new hard drive be defective?
What can I do to avoid this in the future?
