EBAY Warning!!! eBay killed my machine

I was surfing eBay with google chrome, and suddenly was presented with the red malware screen saying that if you continued you could harm you computer.  I dutifully aborted quite a few times. But there was a particularly tasty price on a pair of blue tooth headphones, so i said to myself, "Self what harm could there be?  I have the latest software both Norton and a mall ware checker", so I clicked.  Got a "Aw Snap" couldn't load the page and forgot about it.

Until I went to boot my machine this morning - it was complaining that there was no operating system and that it couldn't find NTLDR.  I freaked, yelled, screamed, pulled out my hair, and in general made a complete fool of myself.   I felt like I deserved it.  The computer had run perfectly for a year or more.  Thankfully i had a second computer sitting right next to the now dead one, and googled some suggestions. However non of them worked and I had to dig out the software recovery disks and restore the system loosing all the pictures, music, Arduino code, and other stuff I wont miss until I need them again.  Plus the fact that it took 5 hours to get the machine back to square one.

I know it was MalWare, because the MBR and boot software was missing, but all the partitions information, and the recovery partition was still there - just the system partition was "bad"

Oh well - stay away from eBay until they figure out how to mitigate this problem. It seems to not actually be eBay itself, but one of the third party software toolkit websites that help out eBay listings, pictures and stuff.  I feel real sorry for the people trying to make a few bucks.  Not all that sorry, but a little.