Fresh Install after boot drive crashed... advice needed plaese

So wake up today turn on my tower and all I get is a grey screen and a clicking boot drive. Sounds like the other three drives are mounting fine. Or my tower is need of some Snow.
So I know enough to say bye bye boot drive.... my question is-
I now have purchased Snow Leopard and will start fresh. Should I take out the remaining three drives while I handle a clean install. Any advice to make this process a bit more painless? I back up all drives expect my boot UGH... I am going to start using time machine.... learned a lesson.

There's no way to know how long a delay will be while waiting for a 'time-out'. It depends on how well or how poorly the OS is able to communicate with the drive, and how bad the controller chips on the drive are. You can view the problem as a Quality of Service issue. Your Mac is trying to communicate with the drive, determine it's size/type/format/timing etc, while also verifying the quality of the data. CRC error checking takes place along with a host of quality control measures implemented with each new version of Mac OS. Leopard made some drives fail due to poorly designed firmwares on the controller chips. SL got even pickier.
During this process, that's failing, the problem could be any part of the driver verification system.
On the other hand, if the drive quits spinning or the controller chips don't answer back at all, the 'time-out' will probably end sooner.
It's luck of the draw when you try to determine the exact cause of a drive failure - controller chips, drive motor, head crash platter damage, r/w head... I just call it 'bad' and throw the drives into a bin where they will get speared with a digging bar before going to recycle

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lahz wrote:
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http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=868833&tstart=0
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=797432&#797432
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http://www.engadget.com/2004/11/02/how-to-get-music-off-your-ipod/
http://playlistmag.com/help/2005/01/2waystreet/
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http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60920
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Fresh Install after boot drive crashed... advice needed plaese

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