Missing Operating System Error

[SSIDiver]

Hello,

My first boot went fine. I've been running Vista Ultimate 64-bit for a little over a day now.

I installed Crysis and SimCity 4 today along with about 19 gigs of my music. I went to play a song and got the blue screen of death and the computer automatically reset.

Upon restarting, I got a message that said "No Operating System Found."

I booted from my Vista disk and tried to repair it. It could not repair it but the root cause found, according to the messages, is "boot sector for system disk partition is corrupt."

Is this a problem with my HD?

I'm running:
ASUS P5KC
Intel Quad Core
4GB of Corsair RAM
WDC 350GB HD (I have it connected through IDE, considering switching it over to SATA tomorrow)
EVGA 8800GTS 512MB
Corsair 520W PSU

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm kind disappointed that my new toy was running fine until now...24 hours later after a very successful first boot.

[The Wise Monkey]

Ouch... that sucks.

How much do you know about the underlying hardware with HDs? Basically, your HD is made up of thousands of individual data area called "sectors". Each sector holds a certain amount of data.

What has happened for you is that one of the sectors holding the data about your OS has become corrupted somehow - possibly because of a hardware fault, but more likely you were just unlucky.

There is a way of recovering from a corupt NTFS boot sector, but it involves directly editing your HD using an MS-DOS backup disk, which I would only recommend doing if you have lots of prior knowledge about HD hardware.

In your situation, seeing as you have only been up and running for 24 hours, I would suggest that you re-install Vista. Its really a pain to have to re-install all your programs and stuff, but its the best way to solve the problem, unfortunately.

[SSIDiver]

Thanks for the help.

Reinstalling the OS isn't too big a deal now...I didn't have much installed anyways.

What is the likely-hood of this happening again? Should I think about RMA'ing my HD with NewEgg and getting a new one?

[The Wise Monkey]

Re-install Vista and run it for a few days, just to see if you encounter any more problems. Don't install much to begin with, but just use it for everyday things for a while and see how it holds up. You may just have been really unlucky. :)