I bought Windows 8 Pro about 2 months ago and installed it onto my PC as a clean install. Once up and running, I  migrated my data from all my family's hard drives with the intention of using the new W8 Pro box as a home server. I set 2-way mirroring on the data thinking this would give me good resilience if any disk were to fail. I was even more confident, when I has read about the fact that the storage pool could be attached to a rebuilt version of W8 Pro if the system disk ever died on me. Job Done! or so I thought.

The data migration went great - took quite a while, but eventually, I had transferred all my music, photos, documents, etc onto my server. A couple of weeks later, I got constant error codes saying that the default gateway was not available or that the link was broken. I tried all sorts or things to fix this with no luck and eventually decided to unplug the storage pool disks and reinstall windows.

The reinstall went ok, and Windows came back online, but 2 days later, when I powered down to reattach the storage pool, the PC just wouldn't boot back up - it continuously reattempts the process of trying to boot up, but in the end tells me that Windows couldn't load or it gives me a blue screen telling me that that it has attempted to execute non_execute memory (amongst others).

I really need some help here because I really don't want to lose all my precious data - is there anyone out there who can advise me?

My HW consists of an Asus P5QL-VM EPU motherboard, 4Gb Corsair XMS RAM, Intel Core Duo E700 2.80Ghz CPU, a system disk containing the OS and a 6-disk storage pool with 2-way mirroring (which is approx. 75% full) - most of the hard drives are brand new.

If you need any more information, please let me know, but any advice would be very much appreciated.

Maybe you have RAM issues.

Please download memtest86+ [1], burn a new bootable CD (use a CD-RW if possible) from the ISO (download and use ImgBurn [2][3] to do this or make double click on the ISO in Windows 7), reboot your PC and scan your RAM 4-5hours for errors. If memtest86+ detects errors, test each module its own and replace the faulty RAM.

If the memtest tells no error, please download CPU-Z [4], look in the memory and SPD tab and verify that the current RAM Speed and the Timings match to the values that you see in the SPD tab. If your RAM run at CR (Command Rate) 1T, change the value into 2T in the BIOS.

Andr

[1] http://www.memtest.org/download/4.20/memtest86+-4.20.iso.zip
[2] http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download
[3] http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?showtopic=61
[4] http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

Hi,

Lets try to repair system by Windows ISO image. Please insert your installation disk and select Repair your computer. When accessing recovery mode, you have option to refresh PC.
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/2269-system-recovery-options-boot-windows-8-a.html

If it cannot resolve the issue, I suggest you unplug the hard drive and attach it to other computer as an external hard drive to copy the data.

Thanks for the responses to date.

Since my posting, I have unplugged all the Storage Space HDDs and formatted, then performed a totally clean installation of Windows 8 onto the system disk. It all installed fine and I have downloaded all the Microsoft security patches and then created a restore point.

From this position of relative confidence, I used the PC in this mode for about 3 days without any issues, so then decided to power down and connect the 7 storage space HDDs up.

On powering back up, it booted up ok and I went into "Manage Storage Spaces" and saw that one of the drives hadn't been properly connected, but that was ok at this point, because I could now see my photos!! I immediately copied them somewhere a bit safer!

I then powered down and attached the 7th HDD properly and powered back up. This time, I got a blue screen. Unplugging the single HDD did not enable the PC to boot back up. However, I have just unplugged all the Storage Space HDDs and I've managed to boot up, log in and write this article!

Before fully logging into Windows, I got a message to send information to Microsoft, which I have done. The message mentioned files being created at:

c:\windows\minidump\081313-24866-01.dmp

c:\users\me\appdata\local\temp\WER-56784-0\sysdata.xml

c:\windows\memory.dmp

Not sure if any of these might help with my issue.

I'm going to replug those HDDs again and see if the issue is replicated. If it does, then I will try the suggestions above.

If anyone has any more advice, please let me know.

when I say formatted in my post above, I mean formatted the System Disk, not the storage space disks!!

ok...just tried again and got same blue screen. Unplug the HDDs and all is ok again.

If I add 6 of the HDDs, I can boot up, but the 7th (86% full) causes the blue screen. I've tried to remove the 7th out of the storage space, but Windows won't let me, despite the fact I have a 3TB disk that is only 17% full and 5 other large disks that are around 80% full. There should be plenty of space to remove!!

With the 6 disks functioning, I have my 2 way mirror pool back, but my large parity pool is still dead.

I'm now lost and don't know what to do next.

BTW, Roger - I have tried repairing, refreshing and every option available, but none of them work.