"A Disk Error Occured Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to Restart"

[Shmee150]

Right still not finished. Running some index fix that apparantly takes all night. Updated estimate was 80-90% of the drive.

I hate hard drives so much now, I expect when I see exactly what files are missing I'm slowly going to break down and give up on life

[peterb]

It has made me take a hard look at my back up strategies. I had a look at Ultrium 2 tape drives, but they are v expensive! So I think I will be staying with offline hard drive storage for the moment.

[Lee H]

I got the same message under exactly the same circumstances (using RAID 0 on SI3114 controller)

I woke up and saw a nice win32.sys error and then rebooted the system to be greeted by the same error message. I was using 2 x 80 Gb Seagate SATA drives in RAID 0 for my windows array so tonight I'll be reinstalling windows on a different drive.

Luckily - all my media, images, photos and music are on a different SATA controller in various other RAID arrays so fingers crossed all these should be fine.

[peterb]

Shmee150 - what was the result?

[Rishi]

For my final year project I took my backup so seriously, one copy locally, one stored on a disk, one stored on second PC, another at the uni server and two more copies about 50 miles away from my university in different directions.

In this case, sure you have a lot of media, but like one guy suggested you could burn most to DVD's, then just have a monthly burn of your new stuff

Oh well, live and learn...

[peterb]

Shmee150 - Thank you.

[carbon8ed]

I have lost similar collections (had backed up all my CD's into MP'3, photos, video clips of my daughter important letters - gone.

I now run 4 x 250 Seagate 7200.10's bought when the google offfers were on so each drive only cost me £32 (I think(. Anyway I run RAID 0 +1 in the Intel chipset . I have 500 GB which is 40 or 50 for windows and the rest for important stuff.

I'm currently typing this with disc on ports 0 completely failed (ie 3/4 discs), tbh I don't think I'll run anything less than RAID 0 + 1, new drive arrives tomorrow - all I do is plug it in, boot up and it sorts everything out. I don't find access times slow or apps (vista 64bit). So that's what I am/would do.

Previously I had 4 80's whicvh were quite fast 'cos their smaller/fewer platters han the bigger drives (I know not correct but thats what it feels like) - it's might not have been quicker it was a different install, but just b'felt' a little better.

Anyway RAID 0+1 and DVD-R's ftw

[peterb]

I was running raid 1 - the problem was memory failure which has corrupted the disks (long story shortened). I have partial backups of some stuff (on a separate hard drive) but not all.

On completion of this exercise I shall be looking at tape solutions, and doing full/incremental backups on a more regular basis.

As I have said (but failed to put into practice completely - physician, heal thyself) - RAID is not a substitute for a proper backup strategy.