I have an Area 51:Site 4 and the hard drive recently took a dump on me. I read you can uncompress a CHD file and load it on a hard drive. Has anyone tried this before?
I had 2 drives fail on me in a matter of weeks in my Rush the Rock pair - rather then put flaky hard drives in there again, I converted them to compact flash with an IDE adapter. I used the same principle as far as extracting the chd file - and they have been running great almost a year later.
To answer your question, yes you can and yes it works.