Recently my hard drive stopped working completely. I was getting an error saying "Unmountable Boot Volume".

Eventually, the tech people at Dell came to the conclusion that I needed a new hard drive.

Does anybody have any idea as to what the cause of this might have been?

Your guess is as good as anybody's.

Bad power supply, shorted IDE/SATA cable, fryed IDE/SATA controller... or HD with defect.

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