Thanks arachnaut for the tip. Alex also, I'll check events on the suspect drive, good idea. I am ordering 2 new drives and using one for image backups of my working systems. It is really incredible how easy it is to reinstall 8.1, it was done in little more than 20 minutes. After 8.1 was in it asked me if I wanted to restore my user settings from the previous installation, which I assume were stored on my cloud-space or some other location at MS? I opted to do it and it restored everything I had set up in my first 8.1 install down to the font sizes and the wallpaper I was using for the desktop, plus all the apps I had downloaded. I really can't say enough about this OS, the performance is awesome too.