How about this?
Friend with a windows 7 installation. He tells me he was using skype and suddenly the system crashed after which Norton had vanished and several pictures went missing. System restore done by his current helper tried twice and failed to work.
I told him to buy a new oem copy of windows (his last being of dubious provenance), have his helper partition the machine into two NTFS partitions and some free space for Linux, and reinstall.
He did this, but was unable to reinstall, not sure why, so brought the machine over. I reinstalled Windows with no problem, and then proceeded to Debian. Well, there was a message about the fstab not being right because of an error involving the partition id. I didn't understand this, but proceeded. All goes well, we install grub, we reboot, and the windows install is nowhere to be found in the bootloader.
After a long story, I put in PCLinux instead, and this goes in and works fine, grub picks up the windows install, we can boot from either linux or from windows, no problem. He goes home, sends me a couple emails showing windows at least works. I get this message: Email from Windows, printer driver, sound, flash player, microsoft security, Admin account for Windows, and it's all still working!
This morning, sad message from another computer, he is down again. It will boot neither Linux nor Windows.
Do you think this might be hardware? I wonder about trying memory diagnostics or hard drive verification program? I can restore the boot sector in windows, I can also take him to lilo, but will it last any better than the others? Or if not that, any other suggestions?
Peter