To check your drives you can use SQLIOStress utility which can be dowloaded from MS:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;231619

I concur with you that updating system tables should be used only as a last resort. This is not such a case. Instead of 'auto_fix' option I use the following...

What optimizations do you run against your db at 1 AM? Index rebuild/defrag? That could be the culprit.

Then you must have a problem in your log shipping setup. Because DDL operations are propagated to a standby server. Without this log shipping would be useless.

In fact, in case a) you take a transaction log backup immediately after failure occured (you don't need data files accessible) - with NO_TRUNCATE clause. Then restore last full backup...

see this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/240872/EN-US/

I've never had to do that so I can offer no personal experience

For answer to a, look up "How to restore to the point of failure (Transact-SQL)" topic in Books Online for details. You should be able to recover all committed transactions...

I wonder if there's a way to change the instance name (part after \) other than reinstall server with different name. Service names, directories etc. have named instance name included,...

One more suggestion. You could set your db into SIMPLE RECOVERY model before running reindexing. Thus, you can avoid large tr. log backups.

1.Perform last transaction log backup to capture all changes prior to...

There's a known issue with rebuildm if you point it to database files located on install cd. Try copying the files to disk, make sure that they don't have read-only...

DBCC DBREINDEX is not an on-line operation - table being processed is not accessible to other processes. I've seen assertions that this is true only when clustered indexes are rebuilt,...

you can query restorehistory table in msdb database.

for example:

select max(restore_date)

from msdb.dbo.restorehistory

where destination_database_name='pubs'

The MS procedure recently worked for me, but just for testing purposes. The dummy database must have the same name as the original one, otherwise you cannot apply the log...

Beware one thing. If you want to copy master and msdb datafiles and you have different drive letters on the new server, pointers to individual dbs datafiles in master will...

check this article and the additional links :

http://vyaskn.tripod.com/moving_sql_server.htm