just noticed you have enterprise edition. You can use asynchronous mirroring with that. Unless you need automatic failover you should consider changing to asynchronous mode (high performance or safety off).

its not a problem, its by design.

with synchronous mirroring the transaction has to be committed on the partner before it can be committed on the primary. so whilst the partner...

can I suggest that once you get you master database back you copy the system database files off to another location. then if you are in this situation again you...

I'd certainly want to test it first in a sandpit environment.

Only sensible to have scripted out objects as a fall back position, and backup the x64 system dbs first. I...

don't know about heavy hitter, does the occasional home run count? 🙂

This blog would suggest you can restore X86 system dbs to 64bit

http://blogs.technet.com/keithward/archive/2009/10/15/upgrading-sql-server-from-32bit-to-64bit.aspx%5B/url%5D

there seems to be a possible msdb bug,...

you are...

if the disk is raided create a new file, it will fill, you will still see a performance benefit.

If you can have the file on a different drive will see...

SQL fills files on a proportional fill basis. i.e it tries to keep all files in a filegroup equally full, which means it would tend to write more to a...

either use 'allow data loss' or if that is not acceptable switch to high safety mode, allow it to synchronise and then do alter database set partner failover

If you want to define which object goes to which file, specifying new filegroups is the only way.

If files are all part of the same filegroup SQL will just spread...

If you start logshipping the log backups done as part of that process should be the only log backups you do.

If you have other log backups not done by the...

what about asynchronous mirroring? Perhaps they should improve their network.

I would never use replication for DR, thats not really what it is intended for.

which leaves log shipping or replication at...

No. You should find the account is...

builtin\administrators is more rights than it strictly needs.

did you use SQL configuration manager to assign the new user as the service account? That would automatically assign it all rights it...

I agree too.

What are the 'current circumstances'?