A friend of mine bought a random desktop PC about two years ago. About two weeks ago, he called up one evening because this trusty workhorse (that was never configured properly, because said random vendor didn't provide installation media, should the disk be wiped to install, say Debian Linux on one partition...) up and died.
So, we go through the possible causes:
Well, it turns out that it was a bad sector on the hard disk -- right where autoexec.bat happened to be hiding.[1] Funny, that. I thought autoexec.bat was soooo late 20th Century. Twenty years later, and that little hack is still causing grief. I'm not sure what the solution to that particular problem, but my friend's workaround was to buy a brand-spanking-new top o' the line laptop and limp along for a few days until he could get his data (no backups, natch).
Some hacks never die.
[1]: Of course, a bad sector in the wrong file in /etc or the bootloader or the kernel would be nasty too, but likely less fatal.
