Do I bother - disk failure pt II

So the disk has largely failed. I recall now why the machine boots from the non-RAID disk - it's because the drivers for the RAID disk are more than a little awkward to load during the recovery/repair step in Vista.

So a new 2TB disk (how the heck am I going to back that up?) disk is on it's way, now i could just stick this in as my .5TB disk was and have this one boot vista off the RAID disk or I could bite the bullet and take this opportunity to do a fresh install of windows 7 on a completely new disk.

Do I bother fixing Vista? Kind of feeling if I'm going to invest the time might as well get the upgrade out of the way.

Hard disk failures ruining my life

Perhaps a little excessive but that's pretty much how it feels. Some of it I seem to have brought on myself.

I have a Windows Vista system (having not paid for windows 7 yet) with three hard disks. Two are arranged in RAID-0 and there is a third newer disk that's larger than the RAID. The OS is installed on the RAID disk and I had larger files and media on the 500GB western digital disk. I say had.

The disk has now, I have concluded failed big time. It started about a week ago and chkdsk - the windows repair tool seemed to fix it, then seemed to fix it again when there were issues again, then took longer to fix it. Now it doesn't complete and the western digital diagnostic tools tell me there are too many errors on the disk to fix it.

So this morning I unplug it. I then discover that actually by some wierd method when I installed vista the system has been booting from the now broken disk but running the OS in the RAID. I'm now faced with trying to get the system to boot to some degree so I can mark the RAID disk as bootable.

I am kind of thinking a new disk and a move to Windows 7 might be easier at this point.

Edit: most of the important data was backed up, but now the disk is gone I'm left wondering if I missed anything - as you do.