Stay tuned; low level physical checks are running as this post is written and this will hopefully shed some light over the mysterious messages. If time permit it, chkdsk will...

Thank You for all input, but none of them is relevant to this installation since it's a very closed and dedicated environment (at a customer site).

The problem is solved right...

Should have mentioned this in my initial post, but this is a failover cluster in an active-passive configuration running SQL2k sp3a on Windows 2000 Server Ent.

Could the same happen if...

From my experience this is typically caused by network communication problems between the clients and the databaseserver. Try to see if the server has a lot of bad packets and...

I don't have similar experience, but from what You tell in Your previous posts, I would recomend that You decrease the growth value instead of increasing it. Try to set...

You could place the backupfiles on a fileshare on another server, NAS, SAN etc. to isolate the backup physically from Your db-server. If You consider this, You have to run...

Given the fact 50/50 read/write, I would have done it like this

-2x Raid 1-sets (mirroring)

-Raid 1 set #1

-OS and RDBMS

-Datafiles (mdf)

-Raid 1 set #2

-Logfiles (ldf)

-TempDb

If Your...

You should also check the following:

-if any backup software is running a file level backup of Your databasefiles (mdf,ldf,ndf)

-if any antivirus software is scanning Your databasefiles

Both could prevent (by placing exclusive locks...

Or You could run the undocumented but otherwise well known DBCC SHOWFILESTATS that returns the total number of extents allocated and the number of free extents for the defined datafile(s). From...