I had a friend's dad's computer's HDD fail while I was installing Linux on it to show him it. That was terrifying. I still remember the error, and I just left with it (and Windows) unable to boot. Later my friend told me that the drive was toast.

Come to think of it, maybe it was me. I might have trashed the MBR? I remember the error, though, "Non system disk or disk error".

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toast0 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

IIRC, that error text comes from the mbr. You may have trashed the partition table?

	▲	Graziano_M a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I think so. It's been ~25 years, and only while typing out that comment did I remember the error message and realize that's probably what I had done. If I recall correctly, he ended up scrapping the drive.

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justinclift 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, sounds like the drive was still physically detected but that the expected boot loader wasn't present any more.