My mother's Dell XPS system has been running fine and dandy for the past two or three years now, and just yesterday I was called in for an emergency situation. Turns out her operating system was corrupted unintentionally and out of nowhere. I was able to salvage data and run a virus scan on the hard drive and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. chkdsk
did nothing for the disk and it would start up but networking, start menu, and other basic functions refused to work and doing anything in Windows Explorer would lock up the machine entirely.
How can an operating system become corrupt with no user malpractice and no signs of a virus?