Woke up early afternoon, thought i’d go online and check some email, talk with a few friends.etc

Computer decides to become completely unresponsive, so ended up powercycling it, only to find after a reboot it’s still rather unresponsive and for some reason the display driver no longer loaded, I figured that i’d have either a dying drive or some file system corruption from that fact i’d just powercycled it without a proper shutdown.  The machine again stops responding completely, so I go for another powercycle and ready a boot CD to being some diagnostics.

But on powering backup it becomes evident that the drive had indeed died as the raid controller now reports a problem with the RAID0 stripe, and the drive is no longer showing in the controller.

I take the drives out of the raid0 configuration and boot a diagnostic cd just to double check it is indeed the drive, the utility fails to find the drive at all although the bios can still see it.

So I just ended up pulling it (and it’s partner) out and then reinstalling the OS on my other 2 drives (I used to have 4 drives in the machine).

Thankfully I have my PC backup on a daily basis to the RAID1 array in the NAS (Network attached storage) as well as doing an online backup of the most important data to the rackspace cloud (via jungledisk) so all I really lost was the HDD itself and the time it took to reinstall the machine (which BTW thanks to Ninite doesn’t take that long thesedays)

The Backup restored succesfully from the NAS so I didn’t need to restore from the Online backup this time… but it’s nice to know that the data’s safe even if something did happen to both the PC and the NAS (which is possible given they are both in the same room)

Did think about doing an Image based backup of my boot drive, but since I don’t find reinstalling to much of a problem I never bother, just would have preferred not to have spent my Saturday reinstalling me machine…