I had a lady call me with her dead computer.  She couldn't remember all that happened but she said a message popped up on her screen saying she had a problem and to hit Ctrl+Alt+Del

She did and the the machine rebooted after a short time and never got past the splash screen for Gateway.

I tried booting into a live Linux cd and it worked but it couldn't see the hard drive.  I tried another Linux distro and it didn't see the drive either.  

I ran spinrite on it and it said the drive was there and in imminent danger of dying.  After 16 hrs. it's recovered part of the data on 18% of the sectors.  I'm thinking I'm going to shut it down as I doubt there's much hope that there is a fully recoverable amount of data anywhere.

What I'm wondering is, is there a virus that did this or was it just the drive failing and SMART drive told her to do the shut down?