Strange event this morning

I was working on my computer and then it rebooted. Very rare. So I try a few things and finally put in the Acronis boot disk and do a restore, all is fine but I'm wondering if I could have just restored the MBR? I don't know what that does but it would have been faster than the 40 minutes to do a whole restore if it would have worked?

Where can I find more info on the MBR restore?

TIA

 

Restoring the MBR wouldn't have made any difference if Windows was corrupted. The MBR only has to do with booting the computer and your partitions.

You'll have to use the computer and see what happens. I have an older computer that would just reboot for no reason. I never did figure out what caused it and it never caused any errors. I converted that computer's OS partition to a VM and the VM restarts sometimes too. This makes me think that it's probably Windows or a software problem.

 

The MBR is used by your PC at boot time only. The contents of the MBR (information about how many partitions you have and where they live on the hard drive) are then loaded into memory. This is what happens as part of the term Mounting a Disk.

Windows or your CPU finding an invalid instruction or address in RAM can cause sudden reboots as can flaky RAM, noisy (electrically speaking) power supply.

As you've reloaded Windows you won't be able to do this now, but if the PC does something similar again then looking in the Windows System Event log might offer a clue.