Not really retro, but today I tried to resurrect my dad's old Dell Inspiron that had died after Windows 10 wiped the C: drive.
I first backed up the old data, which made me curse at Microsoft for not including an easy way to copy a drive's contents to an external drive from the recovery console. Ended up having to misuse notepad.exe as a crude file manager to copy over the data. Got a lot of corrupted file warnings.
Then I tried to reinstall Windows 10, which failed. So I tried to reinstall Windows 7 from DVD, which appeared to work, but then failed big time when downloading updates with an error message indicating data corruption issues. Then the system lost the hard disk, and couldn't read the DVD-ROM drive anymore. Rebooted, looked in the BIOS, and the drives didn't show up. Shut it down, reseated all cables, and tried again. The drives were visible in the BIOS, but after exiting the BIOS the hard disk started making strange grinding noises and the DVD-ROM drive started going "CHUNK", and then the PC couldn't find the hard disk again.
So I guess Windows 10 wiping the C drive was actually caused by a failing motherboard (SATA bus issue, maybe power-related?). By the looks of it the only salvageable bits are the rear fan, some screws, a DDR3 4Gb module, and the CPU cooler, maybe the Wifi module and CPU too. Likely the hard disk is toast, and probably the DVD-drive too.
Edit: Power issue confirmed, one of the largest capacitors in the power supply looks like it has white electrolyte mushrooms growing out of it... 🤣