[airspirit]

I just lost the primary HDD on my main machine, and I'm now looking at replacing it. The thing was a piece of crap OEM Samsung 40GB drive, and I'm honestly surprised it lasted this long ....

At any rate, I'm thinking about replacing it with an 80GB Maxtor DiamondMax 7200RPM/8.5ms/8MB cache drive. I've needed to upgrade due to my huge FTP/leech collection for my network (having every version of Windows, Office, and current game available for upload takes some space), and now I'm forced to.

Problem is, is there any way to draw data off of a rapidly corrupting drive? My machine won't currently boot (it freezes when it gets to that drive), and before it did that it wouldn't boot into Windows (froze during the disk check). I'm thinking that maybe I need to re-install windows on a new disk, hook this up as a slave, and then try to leech it all to the new drive via the recovery console (bypassing Windows disk checking), but is there any damage to my mobo that can be caused by trying to run a disk that is giving up the ghost? Logically, I can't think of one (besides it refusing to boot, which isn't permanent damage), but I just want to be sure here.

I don't mind reinstalling everything, but I have a ton of stuff on there that is irreplacable and I haven't had a chance to back it all up (like saved server logs in case one of my network clients attracts the attention of the FBI). Any advice?