Close Call With A HDD Crash

I came home to my computer today, turned it on, started doing some work, when all of a sudden the disk started thrashing for no reason and my computer locked up.  Hmm.  Strange, but ok.  I press the reset switch, wait for it to boot up.  And it sits at the startup screen endlessly thrashing the hard drive.  Bad.  I tried to go into safe mode, still endless thrashing.  Then after a couple of reboots, Windows says that it needs to do a CHKDSK.  Turns out its finding all these unreadable segments.

Long story short, his is a very bad sign that drive(s) is about to die.  This has me a bit worried since I have quite a bit of data on there that I don't care to loose, but I have no extra drives.  So, I start panicking because I didn't want to buy one from Best Buy, but I didn't want to wait 3+ days to get a cheaper one from NewEgg.  So I determine that I'll buy a more expensive one at Best Buy, then return when I get my cheaper one's at NewEgg.  I went online, priced me a 320 GB for an outrageous $130, jumped in the car and made the rush hour commute to get one.

When I got there, though, it turned out that they were selling 500GB drives for $89 (better than NewEgg!), so I picked me up one.  I threw the new drive in and everyone's worst nightmare:  the backup is a dud.  I frickin' hate those double sided DVDs I bought...Well, turns out that the backup software was a little too finicky, so I took the backup off the discs and burned a new copy and it was happy.  I was able to get my backup restored so that I could boot into Windows again to find out the real damages.

It wasn't too bad.  Everything that I really wanted to take off I could, but there were quite a few corrupted files that I would never have gotten back.  It's ok, I kept backups of real important things like code and such, but it was definitely a brush with a potentially bad situation.  Keep your backups!!!