Finding a scsi drive locally was a PITA. I don't know many mom-n-pop hole in the wall computer stores around here, the ones I went to just looked quizzically, and the megastores like GrumpUSA and BeastBuy don't carry scsi drives. I eventually ordered one from Mac/PCConnection (the only mail-order place worth dealing with since they actually honor the "please don't send me a catalog" flag in their database, but that's a rant for another day)
I got the drive, burned it in over a couple of days with my home machine (running 5 parallel find /drive -exec gzip {} and gunzip processess to give it a good dose of abuse). The drive got formatted and partitioned like the failing drive on badgertronics. It should be as simple back up data, remove sucking drive, put in new drive, copy data over, reassemble the case, and go have a leisurly lunch.
Ha! Friday morning I drove to Digital Mission, my colocation place. (they're awesome if you're looking for reasonably priced coloation), about 1:30 away. MonkeyAss got the machine out of the server room, I copied the data from the dying drive to some free space on the OS drive, opened the case up, removed the old drive (which made a noise like a circular saw. quite frightening), put in the new one, and then restarted the machine.
Scsi timeouts making the second drive not mount (in fact it halted the boot process). After several hours of tweaking scsi hardware parameters, checking terminations, changing IDs, the solution came down to either installing a new kernel (which I didn't want to do since I have some finicky software behind the scenes here), or breaking down and getting an IDE drive.
So, MonkeyAss & I went to BeastBuy, got a Maxtor IDE drive, installed it, and things work fine. I'm just a bit nervous though, having a drive here that's fresh out of the box without any previous abuse under controlled circumstances.
That looks like enough whining for now, so I won't mention the parking ticket, the extra hour stuck in traffic on the way back, smashing a finger in the sceen door coming home, nor the plague of locusts; that'd just be too depressing. Luckily we met some friends at Bonnie's Comfort Food Emporium afterwards, and we all lived happily ever after. The End.