Could it be that DW crashed my system?

Two days ago I upgraded my DefenseWall from v2.56 to v3. I had some problems with Tor and Polipo as described here and Ilya helped me a lot to solve it. I appreciate it.

After that, I left my PC running and went away for some time. When I came back I found a blue screen with some error message. I tried to reboot but I couldn't. Every time I would get a black screen with "A disk read error occured, Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". I tried it so many times but all I would get is that same message over and over again.

After maybe 50 or more attempts I finally succeeded to boot into Safe mode. I uninstalled BCWipe 4 from there because that was a program I installed earlier that day when I upgraded DW. I thought that BCWipe's Transparent Wiping feature might be the reason I can't start Windows. So, I uninstalled BCWipe but that didn't help. After that I still kept getting the same "disk read error" message every time I tried to start my PC.

From time to time (perhaps once in 30-40 attempts) I would succeed to boot Windows but after a few minutes everything would freeze and I had to reboot which led me to that same "disk read error" message.

I decided to boot from ShadowProtect recovery CD and restore a system image from my USB stick but I couldn't do that (explained here).

When I finally managed to start Windows again (in one of numerous attempts) I disabled DW and other security software and did some surfing and torrenting. I left the computer running all night long and I thought that disabling DW and other programs might be the solution to the problem. The next day (today) I zipped the minidump file which I'll send to Ilya, restarted and... you guess... right: black screen with "A disk read error occured Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart".

I then ran SpinRite which examined my system partition, found one bad sector there, spent 15 minutes on trying to repair that one bad sector and finally succeeded to repair it. After that, I successfully rebooted and now I am typing this, but I am afraid to turn off the PC because I am not sure I'll be able to start it again.

Could it be that DefenseWall 3 crashed my system (it happened on the day I installed it) or is it something hardware related (one bad sector)?


EDIT: I've just received Ilya's email reply. He says that crash wasn't caused by DefenseWall.

 

Yes, the crash would not be caused by software. The hd is failing and fixing it should only allow you to restore data. Don't the use hd for anything important.

 

Sounds like a coincidence. SpinRite works wonders at times. A friend of mine had a notebook with the same thing you had, ran SpinRite over it and the next morning it booted up as if nothing had ever happened. I'd go ahead and try re-booting if you have your data backed up. If you don't, now would be a good time