I bought 2 copies of Desktop (v3.202) and DL'd one copy to this Dell machine (24 days remaining on trial). I have not been able to backup the C: drive because of the error shown below.

On my first attempt I tried backing up everything (3xC: partitions, 1xD: full backups) to a third PC on the network and all 4 operations failed. Unfortunately, I did not notice any specifics other than that, at the end of the day, the below mentioned RAID failure froze the Dell requiring power off/on. I decided to wait until my NAS arrived to try again.

On my second attempt yesterday, I attempted to full-backup only the main C: partition to my Linksys DNS-323. It failed (with a reported 6 min remaining of the 2+ hours run time) with the same error:

RAID Access Failure

Access failure: Critical error on

DISK WDC1600ADFD-75NLR1 (Port SATA 1)

After reboot, I successfully did a full backup of the D: drive by itself.

The Dell PC is about 1.5 years old. On bootup, the system reports a "healthy nVidia stripe" (as always), and has otherwise been functioning perfectly. Well, as perfectly as any other Microsoft-driven PC I've ever owned lol.

Any thoughts about what to try/do next? I'm thinking of uninstalling Desktop, and trying with another disk-image utility.

Note: I just peeked at Shadowprotect to gather some info for this post, and it would not respond lol. I terminated the process and reloaded the program to record what it shows as the contents of the nVidia stripe!

System:

Dell XPS 710 H2C

CPU/OS: Intel QX6700 2.66GHz factory OC'd to 3.2GHz; Win XP MCE SP-2

MoBo: nForce4 SLI Intel Edition 570SLI

Disks: (C:) 2x160GB Raptors as RAID 0, (D:) 1x500GB Barracuda

Desktop shows the stripe to contain: *:\ FAT 46.93MB, C:\ NTFS 293.0GB, *:\ FAT32 4.88GB

Your drive on Port 1 is failing.

Philip

Any suggestions on how to pick up and lay down what I can access today?

1: Copy critical data to the NAS just in case.

2: shutdown and pull the dying drive.

3: Boot from the recovery CD and generate a full backup to USB HDD. With the defective drive pulled, you should be able to get a good image off of the partition/volumes.

4: Replace the defective one with a like drive. That means, same size or larger in billions of bytes (HDD manufacturers are not consistent in their GB size indicators)

5: May need to rebuild in the RAID BIOS just after POST.

Good point ... "nVidia healthy stripe"  and all. :P

Sorry ... missed that one.

If you are not able to get a good image, you are bound for a rebuild. Get that data.

Suggestion: RAID 0+1 next time. Costs an extra pair of drives, but would provide a fall back for this kind of situation.

Philip

Yup, lol . . . some things are built for comfort, some for security, some for speed. In the future, I'll be running without RAID at all. I personally don't think its worth it.

 Anyhow, to get back to my problem . . . I thought it worth reporting that I ran CHKDSK from XPs recovery console, and it ran to conclusion fixing a few errors - even though the disk was not marked as "dirty".

Then I tried to run Desktop again, but apparently it will not run while StorageCraft's web site is down, which was the case (for me) in the wee hours of the morning last night. What a run of bad Karma, eh?

I suppose there may be some solid technical reasons beyond copy protection that make this approach a good idea. But, frankly, had I realized in advance that my ability to back up, etc., was dependent on an external website under someone else's control, I would have immediately looked for another approach. That's just doesn't square with my personal concept of backup.

Tonight I uninstalled Desktop, then DL'd and installed another drive-image backup program. The name of that product is not important - what *is* interesting is that it backed up all 3 partitions on my C: drive to my NAS on the first attempt. So I went oh-for-five with Desktop, and 1 for 1 with a different product. Backup of my D: drive just finished, and now I am running a verification pass.

Maybe intermittent failures over the last three days fortuitously stopped tonight . . . maybe CHKDSK did something useful . . . after all, it is technically possible for all the oxygen to rush to one corner of a room suffocating all the occupants. Maybe Desktop has an issue with my configuration, or vice-versa. Regardless, I am now committed to the other product for obvious reasons.

If anyone from StorageCraft is interested in pursuing whether or not I got lucky, I'd be happy to cooperate a bit to help others out.