by Zancarius » Fri Dec 21, 2007 3:00 am
That's really weird. Although, one of the problems with Windows is that it's not completely uncommon for important system files (that were in use during some critical phase) to suddenly corrupt. Honestly, I'm not sure how it's possible. Modern file systems shouldn't lend themselves to that sort of problem. I can see that sort of corruption happening during a write, but I don't see it writing to a system file during normal operations. Of course, it's also possible that your hard disk may be on its way out. Random, inexplicable destruction or loss of data is usually due to some sort of surface problems with the disk.
I recall one problem on my FreeBSD install where part of the disk surface had failed. I had several partitions, /usr, /www, /db, and whatnot. /usr was completely trashed (including all of the backup superblocks) but /www and /db escaped unscathed. I might recommend using some utility like chkdsk on that drive if you're able to get it back up and running. If the disk isn't able to read/write to a cluster, that should be able to detect it if you scan the drive thoroughly for data errors.
Failing the latter, I have no idea what might have caused that problem aside from some freak Windows-related accident.
I gave that lich a phylactery shard. Liches love phylactery shards.