MBR's continued

Having taken the machine to Staples, I discovered that I did NOT, in fact, have to replace my hard drive. All that needed to be done was to run a little disk repair utility off the XP CD's, which I was not provided with when I bought the machine. This lowers my opinion of Cisnet tech support even further (or at least the dolt that I talked to). I was told by the Staples repair dude that MBR errors are common with fragmented drives, and running the defrag utility in every copy of Windows would mitigate the chances of them happening again. If errors like this are relatively common (given the circumstances) and so easy to fix in general, why the heck did the guy on the support line tell me to replace my bloody hard drive!!??

I've had some experience on the other side of a tech support line, so I feel for the people who do the job, but not for those who neglect the obvious troubleshooting steps. The first thing I would have done, confronted with an error of this kind, would be to ask "Have you run the MBR repair utility on the Windows XP CD?" If, as in my case, the customer did not have a copy of Windows, I would then suggest that they find a legit copy and use the MBR fix on it. I would never suggest such a drastic step as a hard drive swap or even formatting the existing drive until all other options had been exhausted.