I spent a fair chunk of my free time this weekend dealing with a jacked up hard disk on my home PC. I have a Shuttle XP for my home box, and it only one drive can fit in the case, so any drive issues are serious - all the cookies are in the same jar!

I had a 160GB Western Digital Caviar disk, which I partitioned into 4 ~40GB drives. I noticed that things were running a bit slow, and figured it may be time for a defrag. When I opened Disk Manager, it seemed that my "F" drive had disappeared. Or,more specifically that everything on it was gone, as Disk Manager was noting that it had 100% free space. Uh oh! This was the drive that held all our digital photos - specifically 30Gb of photos. Thankfully I have a local back up on a USB drive (runs weekly), and an off-site backup @ Mozy.com, so at worst we may have lost a few days of photos.

Right about this time, everything on the machine started to bog down. File Explorer would hang, "cd-ing" in a command prompt was dicy at best. I managed to setup a check disk (chkdsk /f) on the C: drive and rebooted. After a lot of thrashing, XP came back up - slightly more stable.

I was able to copy pretty much everything else that I wanted off the other partitions before the disk failed outright, so that was good.

Anyhow - this was the perfect excuse to get a 10,000 RPM disk, and upgrade to Vista. I popped out to BestBuy and grabbed a Western Digital Raptor, and then started downloading the Vista Ultimate ISO image from MSDN. After about 2 hours it was done, and burned to a DVD. I booted from the DVD, and in less than 30 minutes I had Vista up and running. Smooth as silk.

Now I just need to spend a few hours installing everything!