Use the PC tools to fix up disk error and try to do this every week.

The tales presented are the novel "The Wolves of Memory" and the short stories "Fatal Disk Error", "In the Wings", "From the Desk Of", "The Wicked Old Witch", "Mango Red Goes to War", "The Thing from the Slush", and "Posterity".

Just as RAID solved the "disk error" problem of the early '90s, and 'data protection' will solve the backup problem that persists, so to will 'workflow-based process automation' (operations management) solutions pave the way to solving the storage complexity problem of the 2000s.

I've just started using Windows XP and I'm getting an intermittent hard disk error message.

You sit down at your computer, ready to work, press the power button and are greeted by a black screen stating "Non-system disk or disk error." Restarting the computer doesn't help -- it's gone, your hard drive is now pushing up daisies rather than serving up bits.

Richard Powers creates in his character "Ricky Powers" (aka Marcel, as in Proust) a persona for whom it is possible to respond to a disk error with hurt feelings.

* "Non-system disk or disk error replace and press any key when ready"; and