I would really appreciate some advice on an issue I have with my home built Home Server. The hardware is a Dell PowerEdge 830 server 3.2Ghz Pentium D with 4Gb ram. 160Gb System drive. 1x 650Gb, and 3 1Tb hard drives for data pool. The data drives are all on a Promise SATA PCIE add in card
The system has been running fine for about three years without any major issues but lately I have been getting Delayed Write errors. The message all appear to state unable to write to C:\fs\O\$Mft.
I addition to this it is VERY slow accessing files on the data share. They do open eventually but take ages. There was also an error in the Console about File Conflicts relating to a single folder so I decided to delete the folder. This took 2 days with repeated Try again actions required when the file was not accessible.
I ran Chkdsk /r on the C: drive and it ran through without finding any errors. I am currently using a Vista boot disk to run chkdsk on the remaining drives but although it takes ages so far it has not found any problems.
One other error was opening the console which complained that a .dll relating to an add in (Duplication Info) was causing a problem. I managed to uninstall the add-in and the console appears to open OK. In Server Storage all disks appear health and the same with the Disk Management add in. Also In the Computer Management snap in all drive appear healthy in Disk Management.
The server itself is fairly responsive when I log in via RDP or directly but file transfers and especially writes to storage are painfully slow.
Do you think this is a disk failure and if so is it likely to be the System disk or one of the data disks? Alternatively could it be the Duplication Info add in that has corrupted the file table database.
Fortunately I back up all the important shares but Public tends to be a temporary dumping ground for customer data and films I am converting before dropping in the Video share. If it turns out to be the system disk how likely am I to add all the drives back to the pool and recover the data.
Finally is there a good tutorial for doing a system re-installation on a replacement C: drive?
Many thanks
Fozzie