Complete hard-drive crash!

[yo _]

Hello!

Hi everyone, i was under the impression that FreeBSD had great hard drive 
reliability even when using Soft Updates. I'm sure it does as nothing like 
this has ever happened to me before. I'm using FreeBSD 4.8 Release with a 
custom kernel (nothing questionable taken out) with the packaged version of 
KDE 3.1.0 that comes on the dist CD. I've been using it very stably for 
about a month  and a half now (less than zero problems) and today i opened 
Konqueror and my computer HARD FROZE, super hard. Since most of my files are 
backed up daily i wasn't worried, and usually with freezes not many files 
are lost, if any.
Well when i rebooted after the freeze my hard drive lost it's MBR i guess 
(or maybe it got corrupted) because my bios gave me "NON SYSTEM DISK OR BOOT 
ERROR." I rebooted once more after that, and the FreeBSD bootloader came up 
(slower than usualy) and slightly complained about not findind loader.conf. 
Then it attempted on loading the kernel, until the kernel finished loading 
(stopped printing devices) and gave me a prompt and asked me what root 
device i shoudl load ( it was in the form of <fstype>:<device>) i attempted 
ufs:/dev/ad0s1a but it named a bunch of errors and i was forced to reboot 
into the same process again and again. So i fsck'ed alll my partitions that 
were mounted when it first crashed (using FixIt) and i was able to get all 
my files back. The problem is the files were scattered throughout each 
partition in lost+found and some folders were just gone, so the filesystem, 
i think, is completely ruined.
I was using Soft Updates for all my partitions besides the root partition 
(even though the root was also missing a lot of files too). I wanted to know 
what could have caused my hard drive to crash so hard and also how i could 
avoid this type of behavior in the future because as it looks i might have 
to do a complete reinstall. Also, How can i reinstall the FreeBSD standard 
MBR? (the one that is minimal and only loads FreeBSD). Thanks a ton!
-rian

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