>> There is no good way to make the poor soul who has no standby server
>> happy here. You're just choosing between bad alternatives. The first
>> block error is often just that--the first one, to be joined by others
>> soon afterward. My experience at how drives fail says the second error
>> is a lot more likely after you've seen one.
For what it's worth Oracle allows you to recover a specific block from
backups including replaying the archive logs for that one block.
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greg