[blue68f100]

The GOS is only free if you have a service contract.. Other wise you have to purchase it. Overland has released the old SnapOS for free downloads. But it is only for 10yr hardware that does not support Vist or OSX.

No generator at the site for backup power? Where I use to work we had huge UPS and diesel powered generators. When I left we only had 3 gen and another was in the budget for live spare. These Cat generators burned 120gal/hr, 12 cyl quad trubos locomotive engines. The startup seq had these on line and sync in less than 3 min. Power had to be restored for 5 min and stable before it would switch back to provider power. On your ups setup do you have it set to do an auto shutdown and restart. On restart I have mine set not to restart till the batteries have a min of 25% battery level. This normally takes about 15-20 min, but it eliminates failures when the power is bounced. If bounced normally it will die due to weak batteries. Remember the 4500 take 5-6 min to boot, so you need at least that amount before restarting.

Spinrite is setup to run from a CD or Floppy, both are bootable. It can be run from a usb drive if its bootable. This program is written in assembly language. You will need to be at the machine since you must power down and remove the HD's to be checked to a desktop pc. I know it's a pain, I recheck mine once a year. So I detect when a HD is starting to have problems.