OK here's my situation. I've got two 500GB drives in my tower. One, the original I bought when I built my rig, is a Seagate. Seems like a fine drive, except the fucking thing is dying... very, very slowly. A lot of signs are there: it's overly loud, the amount of free space literally changes by 5-60GB at random times, and, most annoyingly, it CHIRPS or rather, BEEPS a fucking ton when it's working hard. this drives me nuts for some reason. I'm pretty sure hard drives aren't supposed to go beepybeepbeepbeepbeepbeep..beepbeep when you're loading a game. I'm 99% sure it's the drive - it only make the noise when the drive is being used heavily.

Anyway, it's been like this more or less since last September. In a way, I'm really fucking lucky the drive has died on me yet. In early December, I bought another 500GB SataII, but this time it was a Western Digital. I like this drive a lot more - when it's being used, it's relatively noiseless and obviously, no beepbeep. However, when I put this drive in, my Seagate seemed a lot quieter. For whatever reason, I thought having another drive in the drive tower solved the problem. Welllll, recently, the original drive, the Seagate, has been really noisy again, and it's getting even more sporadic in changing how much free space I apparently have on it. I've realized I better just up and return it to Seagate now and get a replacement. Here's my question:

My Western Digital now has a lot of stuff on it - several complete TV series (BSG, Arrested Development, The Office etc, so a lot of big folders), plus a lot of games and other random files - all told, like 250GB of stuff, leaving about 200GB free on the drive. Basically, I'd like to put Vista on this drive, but I don't want to lose all my data - What's the best way to go about this? I mean, backing up 250GB is a lot of time, nevermind also backing up all my files on the old Seagate drive, which is all my movies, some other games, music etc. I've never really dealt with this sort of stuff before so I'm clueless!

Ideas?

You can install Vista without having to reformat if the drive is Fat32 or NTFS.