Thanks for the quick reply Gail.

Manually removed the filenames, confidential system.

Server is basically being rebooted on a 3 hourly basis atm.

Just quickly took opportunity to run the dbcc command you suggested, it ran for a minute without any problems, so will have to engage business today and see if we can schedule downtime tonight perhaps.

however doesnt using tablock, switch to using tempdb for the work that is carried out.

only reason i ask that, is if i do a dbcc check table with the tablock and estimateonly, for the biggest table in the database which has about 880 million rows, it shows 300GB estimate for TempDB.

unfortunately tempdb is on drive with only 2GB free. there is no way to increase storage, unless i make the drastic step and move tempdb on to one of the other volumes which has 300GB+ free capacity

server has dedicated NAS and therefore is not on normal SAN, Netbackup is how the databases are backed up. Netbackup cannot be used apparently so the only way to backup the database is to P2V and they can change the storage but if they do that, only one copy can be active as the server name will be same. so complicated.

But i totally agree with what you are saying, does the suspect_pages table in msdb, indicate data corruption, or are they purely read attempts that failed and have got the pages marked as suspect.