Some bad news about my desktop PC ... Picture, above. 

Hint: the red mark on the IDE2 Slave drive ... that isn't good. 

That PC has ar least 10 years of accumulated information ...
documents, images, URLs, eMail, ...

As of now, no data lost because of the RAID array. 

As I speak, full backup (80GBy to an external HDD.

Then a full backup to another external HDD.

Tomorrow I'll buy a replacement 40GBy HDD to rebuild the RAID array. 

... Then I'll start building my next PC (dream machine). 

I'll keep you up to date on my efforts. 

--
Martin
p.s., BTW that wasn't the worst news I got today.

What could possibly be worse than this???????

I see that nongo might be a student of disaster planning because he asked,

What could possibly be worse than this???????

Well ... the first bad thing after one drive of the RAID array failed was finding out how
difficult it would be to get a replacement drive of the same size (40GBy).

The next bad thing was a phone call that I got while researching HDD availability. 
But that phone call, although bad news, was also the solution ... not related to the
HDD failure ... just some real world ... real life ... non technical stuff. 

More on that ... later ...

--
Martin

I believe nongo (Akemi) might not be to partial at being called a he... ;'] Smart planning and a good illustration of why one should have a good backup plan in place and active. Mine is still ... disfunctional. If I had the money I'd invest in this neat little device since it is Time Machine compatible. Drobo It looks like you might have a similar, though not quite as modern, set up Martin. Good luck with your effort, and I hope the other news was not too bad.

I see that TwoPynts offered the outstanding advice that,

nongo (Akemi) might not be to partial at being called a he... ;']

Oooppppssss ... sorry. 

Smart planning and a good illustration of why one should have
a good backup plan in place and active.

True ... but the plan can always be improved. 

Toight I will be building a better mousetrap ... errr ... better PC. 

The key design change will be to have a RAID-1 array (20GBy) for the OS
(windows folders; Program Files folders; browser cache; and maybe the
Photoshop swap file. 

The second RAID-1 array (300GBy, or so) will be for data files. 

I hope the other news was not too bad

The other news was bad enough ... but under control and no harm done. 

Mine is still ... disfunctional.

Who said I wasn't??? ... they weren't paying close attention ... [sly grin]

--
Martin

Greetings ...

Progress report ...

New box operational with dual CPU; 20GBy (mirrored) system drive;
320GBy (mirrored) data drive; CD-R/W; VGA; sound; network; serial (2 ports);
USB 2.0 (4 ports); USB 1.1 (2 ports) ...

I know it is a stable configuration because I played several hands of Freecell ...
and won!  [grin]

I'm tired now ... tomorrow I'll install DVD R/W; reload my data and install applications
... and test ... test ... test ...

--
Martin

Greetings ...

Yet Another Progress Report ...

New PC is running well ... seems faster than the old one ... have loaded about
100GBy (that includes some folders that had been offloaded from the old PC
before it had crashed).  Getting used to Windoze XP -- had been using Windoze
ME on the old PC. 

I still have to reload the rest of the software (Photoshop, M$ Office, ... )
... and test ... test ... test ...

--
Martin
p.s. Posting this mesage from the new PC.