Disk imminent failure handling

[qsrvbas@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

I've got a PC that reports a "S.M.A.R.T. Bad, backup and replace" 
message at boot-up time. I know that this is a result of predictive 
failure analysis and that I need to get the existing drive out of 
there and put another in its place, but I'm not sure of exactly how 
it ought to be done.

The drive is a Hitachi 160GB Serial ATA and I have a replacement. 
That drive is in fact currently physically installed as SATA2, but 
I'm not yet willing to power the PC back up to install the drive 
logically. That's because I don't really know what the steps should 
be anyway.

The original drive was partitioned off as 20GB, 30GB and 70GB 
partitions giving three logical drives. All three partitions have 
been (apparently) successfully backed up into files in my AS/400's 
IFS. The PC runs a fully patched Win2K.

It's possible that the PC will boot and run off of the 'bad' drive 
for another few months, or it might fail as soon as I start it back 
up again. Once the three backups completed, I wasn't quite so 
nervous. I _really_ don't want to run through the whole Win2K 
install and all of the downloads/patches, but I suppose it could be 
done.

Does anybody have any experience to pass on?

Thanks for any advice on procedures.

Tom Liotta