[andrewas]

Your reboot occured while the registry was being written to. Whether the file was damaged or not, NTFS was and the computer isnt even trying to use it. I really do detest M$ at times. Can you tell?

The BIOS autodetect would pick up the details of the new drive so you can access it. Without running it, you would either have to enter the details by hand or not be able to access the hard drive at all.

Some machine automaticaly autodetect on startup though.

Doubt it would be a virus.

AS for preventing it occuring again, most likely the computer threw a stop-code at you, but M$ (I may have mentioned I dont like them very much) decided that BSODs scare users, and the message was never shown to you. In future, control panel -> system -> advanced and uncheck 'automaticaly restart'. With any luck you will get another error soon enough, and hopefuly it wont knock out your computer.

Get that error code and we can try and figure out whats causing it. These things are almost always down to a hardware conflict, although it can be bad drivers.