Close... Too Close

I've been having more and more problems with my main external hard drive lately. Today, it took about ten minutes for my computer to recognize it. So I hied off to Best Buy, which has a Seagate 500 GB external drive on sale for $119.99, and I'm copying like crazy. There have been a few hosed and corrupted files, but nothing at all vital. I've got almost everything on DVD anyway, but I'll probably make extra copies just in case.

I also have to do a full hard drive wipe and reinstall on a Gateway laptop I got for a song (almost literally). It's all Vista 'n' stuff, and I'm going to make it an XP machine.

Any tech woes or triumphs on your end?

ETA: Oh crap. I think a lot of stuff might be hosed, on multiple machines. Not related, just all at the same time. It's gonna be a long night.