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Had a bad day with my main development machine yesterday. For some obscure reason during a fairly routine download it slowed right down then suffered a total lockup. I left it a good 10 minutes to see if it was going to bounce back to life as it still seemed to be responding albeit very very slowly, but I eventually gave up the ghost and decided a hard reset was the only way out. I don’t like doing this and have only done it a handful of times on this pc which has been very stable since I built it a couple of years back.

Anyway the deed was done and I waited it rebooting but it never. I simply kept going so far through the reboot and then restarting again. I tried evrything I know including adding a spare hard drive tot he system, loading an OS onto it and simply treating my main partition as a spare drive so I coul dget data off. But the main partition (SATA RAID based) kept showing an IO error and any attmpts to examine it from Windows Set up resulted in a BSOD saying error in ntfs.sys.

I tried a CHKDSK from Windows boot up from the spare disk, and this basically found my main RAID partition destroyed.

Fortunately I have a external Hard drive I use to run backups on and this has about 98% or my work on, up to about a week back.

So I decided to do a format and clean install. The Disk array came up fine though all my data is gone. I have also tried a clean boot of Vista on it and this went well- see other post as there is a way round the RAID driver issues.

So I have decided to do a full clean install onto Vista thus getting me back working with a swanky new interface. I have been using Vista quite a bit on my laptop but really want to get using it now so having a disaster like this is as good a time as any.

I am currently restoring data and programs, so if you are waiting on work from me , be aware I might be a bit delayed. My biggest problem is probably that I have lost all my email data., hopefully I should be back fully operational by the end of the weekend, hopefully with a slightly quicker PC seeing its now freshly rebuilt.

I also took the opportunity to install a spare 500Gig SATA disk as a system backup volume so I can use this to replicate my data to on a scheduled basis.