so not to burden him with information overload.
Understood, and I generally agree with this sentiment, but in this case, it might have saved some fumbling around with cables and jumpers... But your presumption is most likely correct, especially if his motherboard is older.
I always thought that NTFS automatically allocates a certain percentage of sectors as "hot fix" sectors
I don't believe that this is the case although NTFS will move data on questionable sectors to good sectors, I don't think it pre-allocates them. NTFS is, however, much more difficult to mess up than FAT.
One thing though, maybe I missed it, but we don't know what file system TimB is running. He could be using FAT32...
On a side note, a boot manager might have allowed him to regain control over his computer. Risking information overload
, I can't recommend highly enough BootIt NG (
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html ). It is a boot manager, parition manager (resize, create, etc), backup paritions (to disk, USB, CD, DVD), backup MBR... It fits all on one floppy disk. (note: I don't work for them, I just love the product).
In this case, I think booting from the BootItNG floppy, regaining control of the boot process and restoring the MBR may have fixed the problem. If it was the MBR that caused it...