Losing XP's NTOSLDR.EXE - likely causes?

I ran into an Corrupt Or Missing NTOSLDR XP box recently and have been wondering about the likely causes of this. It was a 2-week-old XP-clean-install (wipe out, reload) and suddenly the HD dies? Gee - odd... ran for 5 years, but CHKDSK reports errors. Strange... corrupted sectors?

I replaced the drive, reloaded XP and ten hours of updates and programs, but then remembered two issues...

The only 'new' programs I'd installed two weeks ago were a Logitech Wireless Mouse & Keyboard, and ULTRA DEFRAG 6.0.0, which was only a week old.

That's a little 'soon' for me to be playing with newly-released defragger optimizers.

I wonder - could ULtra Defrag 6.0.0. be The Problem? I haven't tested it out on any other machines - I should probably try that.

I did notice there were "likely causes" of lost or corrupt NTOSLDR lists that included "keyboard errors" but - c'mon - really?!!

Anyone have experience with the likely causes of NTOSLDR losses?

 

Filesystem errors and drive failures are some of the most common causes of ntldr errors.

 

Plus the fact that chkdsk reported errors seems to indicate that hard drive failure is imminent. I don't know that running chkdsk C: /r will do much good.