Oooh, Fry's.... Mmmmmmmm.....
So my boot disk is completely fried. Gotta get a new boot disk. My data disks are both just fine, so that's a huge relief.
I go to Fry's during lunch to get a nice 40G hard drive. I ask the seemingly innocent question of the sales dude, "Which of the Maxtor, Hitachi, or Western Digital drives will be the most reliable?" He answers "Seagate". Okay, but that's not on my list.
It turns out there is a nice Seagate 120G for $100. A huge pile of them. So I pick one up and head for the checkout.
"You know, it's stupid to use a 120G as my boot drive. I only use 10G or so on that disk, everything lives on the data RAID."
So I did the logical thing and bought two of them! They are now my data RAID, and one of the old 40G data disks is now my boot drive. Whee!
Last night I spent hours and hours installing software and junk. I'm currently (in absentia) copying the data files form the other data drive to the new array. It was giving me some attitude last night, so I actually expect to see it stuck when I get home.
Once everything is settled, I'm going to Ghost the boot drive onto the RAID. Then, when it pukes again in a year or two I can get the base install back easily.
There are still a few programs that refuse to store their data on a drive of my choosing. For example, Firefox and my PDA synchronizer.
I *might* be able to beat Firefox into submission... dunno about the PDA. All applications should, as a matter of principle, allow you to specify your data destinations