Dual Booting to avoid a broken Hard Drive

My Hard drive started ticking! Oh Shit, I thought, sounds like it is about to go bust.

All my files are on my 2nd drive so if my 1st one breaks then I wont lose my files, just the ability to boot my system until i get a new drive and probably another copy of Windows (I have an OEM Vista copy at the moment) but Windows 7 doesnt come out for a few more months! So what do I do?

I checked online for solutions and I figured, well instead of buying a new copy of Vista and reloading it onto a new drive, why not just clone it onto a new drive, then pull the old one out and shove the new one in.

To be honest, after looking online for a few days to sort this out, I gave up.

But I do think I have a new solution! I have just grabbed Ubuntu (Linux) a free operating system and I downloaded it and installed it from within windows to my 2nd (Healthy) hard drive.

Easy!

This way, if my primary hard drive does fail, I can still boot my system with Ubuntu on the second drive and access the net etc until I get a new drive with windows 7 on it!

something to consider I reckon if you are having a similar problem!

Ubuntu seems awesome and dual booting seems like a great idea!

Muzz