Hard disk crash - weird thing happened
 

Very strange occurance - just wanted to know if anyone has any thoughts on the cause....

One of my colleaques 16 year old son's PC wouldn't boot up - seems that it was running slowly the day before and didn't shut down properly. Trouble was a lot of his course work was on it and submission is next week.

I went down to see if I could access it. Machine wouldn't boot so I used a linux live CD to see if I could read it - but nothing. Drive looked buggered.

Ended up being sent to a data recovery company who have said that the entire 250 gig hard drive is filled with the letter 'b' with the odd '0' here and there. They've never seen anything like it. Physically the drive is fine. They think it would take 2-3 hours of disk trashing to have done it.

So, any ideas?

First one I had is that the son ran a data wipe program on the hard drive - but he's academically pretty smart and it's very much against his character.

Any other thoughts? Virus? Windows went loopy?

Cheers
Richard.