Quote:
Originally Posted by lumberjim
Oh, I was just noting that I bought it at Best Buy because I didn't get any discs with it. I don't know if they cut corners like that so that they can be priced competitively in the big box stores.
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That was explained previously. Some permit burning that disk. Most users do not or ignore that option. Having you burn the disk saves them (ie Sony) a few dollars - proabably less.
As you have seen, essential to recovering a system is to have that disk - or something equivalent. Same disk that better manufacturers locate comprehensive hardware diagnostics.
Formatting is popular. Also called nuke'n pave. Does not make a system any more stable - except if the system is contaminated with malware that security software does not locate. Many do that when normal recovery software is never learned. And when discovering (suspecting) the reason for failure is unimportant.
lumberjim appears to have an intermittent problem as indicated by so many files and index pointer changes that normal should never happen or that are automatically corrected by the filesystem.
Reasons for that intermittent failure still have not been identified. Malware is one possible reason. Doubtful. Most likely reason for such massive corruption is hardware failure. In particular, a intermittent failure. That is what the system logs are for. Intermittent failures are stored in those event logs. Windows works around the failure. Characteristics (especially for intermittent failures) are discovered later by examining those logs.
If that laptop has intermittent hardware failures, critical information(how to avoid failures before failures created problems) may be listed in those logs.
Copying data via Ghost is highly recommended. Nothing says the failure was fixed; only the resulting problem was solved.