A root cause analysis (RCA) is commonly not discussed in database recovery plan literature. The literature tends to focus more on backup strategies and the BACKUP and RESTORE statements. However, there is no point in initiating a database recovery plan if you have not identified and resolved the root cause of the problem-for obvious reasons. In certain cases, such as with the failure of disk drives, the root cause will be obvious. In other cases, however, such as database corruptions, the root cause might be more subtle or more difficult to detect, such as bad memory, incompatible firmware, failed hardware controllers, and the like.
Knowing what can fail will certainly help, as will knowing where to look for information:
SQL Server error logs
SQL Server Agent error logs
Windows Event Logs
Hardware vendor logs
That is why we strongly believe that DBAs should keep current on the latest operating systems and hardware available.