What the heck is an MBR?

Well, I suppose if you buy a computer the manufacturer of which you've never heard of, you should probably expect some issues. I recently bought a Cisnet clone from Staples during a little sale they were having. It was meant to replace the Dell laptop that I'd gotten cheap from Acadia, which had died on me in a series of progressively frustrating stages. I've had the Cisnet for little over a month now, and a few days ago I started getting weird system hangs. No error messages, no screen glitches, not even a handy BSOD to let me know something was really wrong. The thing just stopped responding. I was able to wriggle the cursor around a bit, but even that stopped once I got too click-happy.

After a manual reboot, things seemed OK for a bit, but the same thing happened about 15 minutes later. Both times I had been using Firefox, so I figured I'd try Internet Explorer to see if it was the browser that was giving me problems. The system hanged itself immediately upon opening a single Explorer window. Gah.

I'm not entirely discouraged at this point. I then try to do a system restore on the machine, which seems to do the trick, until about 4 hours later, it happens again. This time, when I reboot, I get an "MBR error" on start up (mbr = master boot record, something apparently very important), and it tells me to select a proper boot device! I manage to get to the Windows loading screen a few times, apparently by complete accident, but it just sits there, endlessly waiting for an instruction from a system that has apparently given up the ghost. Finally, I try the last resort - formatting the drive using my recovery disks. What happens? I get a "hard drive write error", which essentially tells me that the machine is well and truly fucked.

I did call Cisnet tech support, who were singularly unhelpful in the giving of explanations department. I run through the troubleshooting steps that I have taken with both level 1 and level 2 support and all I get is an instruction to have my drive replaced. Not to mention that the singularly unhelpful tech support people gave me no indication as to what might have actually happened to my machine, AND they spoke in nigh incomprehensible accents so I had a hard time telling what exactly they were saying.

While I accept that, yes, I am going to have to replace my hard drive, I really don't know why, and whether or not I can recover anything from my current one. The only explanation I can think of is that Cisnet makes shitty PCs. I'm going to keep the computer, because I can't afford to get a new one, but I wouldn't buy another Cisnet if I had other options. Luckily I have a 2 year warranty for the machine, which means a new drive won't cost me anything.