Our apologies- we're not ingoring you, we're just stretched a little thin helper-wise right now.
What exactly happened in your case I can't say, but having been through it a few times before, here's the general course of events as best I could determine once I'd resurrected the drives:
1. Something (could be anything) corrupts a piece of software, usually a driver. In my last two incidents the culprits appeared to be a) a power outage, and b) a driver update conflict. SOmetimes the STOP code in a Blue Screen error can help you more accurately determine the exact source of the corruption.
2. Driver goes BANG!, OS gets showered in shrapnel, and either the driver, the OS, or both do some serious fandango on disk and memory locations that they definitely shouldn't be writing to.
3. One of those areas turns out to be the Master Boot Record, the Master File Table, the Partition table, or some equally critical and low-level section of the drive.
Linux has some tools which will try to "guess" the partition type (FAT, NTFS, ext2, etc.) of a damaged disk and will therefore often be able to mount and access the disk (assuming the entire partition table isn't hosed) when Windows can't. Linux also obviously doesn't care about Windows boot-related files, so doing something like trashing the NTLDR file won't stop Linux from being able to recover the rest of the files on the drive.
As for the AVG "false positives", I've never heard of AVG exhibiting that behaviour before, and I use AVG on a lot of machines.
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Wombat At Large
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