My brother was hit by a recent update to Windows 7 that prevented the machine from booting. He went to Microcenter to buy a hard drive. There were a lot of people doing the same thing for the same reason when he was there.
I don't use the windows side of my machine very often, but decided to update it last night. Booted fine (OS on SSD), but one of the HDDs with all of the windows files was corrupted. No go with ntfsfix, chkdsk, partition table destroyed. Reformatted it as ext4 and windows doesn't get to touch it anymore. Haven't tested it too much yet but seems to be working fine.
Remember to use backups!