Need help immediately! hard drive failure?

I just got a VisionTek Radeon HD 3870, I uninstalled the drivers for my old nvidia card, and put in the new ATI Radeon card. I installed the drivers, rebooted, then went to go check out the amazingly amazing graphics on Crysis. My system crashed for about 2 minutes after I hit “Optimal Settings” and then put all my settings on low. I changed them all to medium/high, to what I thought was best. Right when I was going to run the game, one of my hard drives just died, it stopped spinning, and of course it was the one that had Windows Vista on it. So my system hung and crashed, and now I can’t get that hard drive to show up anymore. I disconnected the dead hard drive, which I hope isn’t really dead, and then tried installing Vista over again on another hard drive that used to have xUbuntu on it. After around 80% the hard drive I was installing Vista on did the exact same thing. Now I’m left with one working hard drive, with all my documents on it. I’m caught in a loop as there is no possible way that I can get myself to erase years and years worth of data, as there would be no possible way of getting over 75% of it back. My Music, My , Games, everything is on that drive. If that one were to die, I would seriously have nothing left. I would have to start off completely new, and it would take me years to get back to 10% of what it used to be. Now, I’m debating on putting the old video card back in to see if maybe, I’m using too much power. However, I’ve read everywhere and even on the box that the 3870 hardly requires any power (a 450 watt power supply). I either have a 700 watt or a 750 watt, but that shouldn’t destroy my hard drives one at a time. I’m away from home on vacation right now, in the middle of wyoming to be exact, so I can’t do anything to my computer until I get back. I just really want this to work by the time I get back, or only at the most a week to get it fixed. I’d also not like to spend another $500 just replacing bad parts, getting a new motherboard and all of that assorted junk. I’ve already spent way too much on this computer, and I’m getting really stressed out on all the repairs I’ve had to do to it. Here are some of my specs:
Motherboard: nVidia 680i SLI (Yeah, an nVidia board with a new ATI video card? WTF?)
Video card: ATI VisionTek Radeon HD 3870 512MB GDDR4, or an nVidia XFX GeForce 6800XT (Major, major difference, I really hope it works as I really want to see Crysis at work)
Power Supply: 700-750 watt modular power supply, I have the video card directly hooked up to the power supply, no interfering cables leading to the video card
Memory: 2GB Dual Channel Memory
That’s all that should matter. I only started having problems once I hooked up the video card. Am I supposed to have an AMD/ATI certified Power Supply and motherboard before even trying out this beast? Do I need more power? I checked everything, I assume I should have enough power for my system with 3 hard drives and a video card that barely takes up any power compared to its predecessors (the X1600). Thanks a lot, I really hope someone can help me get this fixed.
Answer #1
Your system crashed for about 2 minutes after you hit “Optimal Settings”. That’s a sure sign that something is not right with that ATI Radeon card. Put the old video card back in. But most important, go out and buy an external hard drive and copy all your music, , games, etc. to it right away. You spent years collecting all that stuff. It’s not easily replaced. That should be your top priority.
Answer #2
external hard drive
and get a USB2 external hard drive encosure
same thing as above but without a hard drive installed
then try installing your “bad” drives and see if they work in it
the hard drive enclosure has it’s own power supply
be sure to get the correct interfase for your drives, either SATA or PATA (IDE)
Answer #3
Oh wow, I’m on a really slow network, I left the posting page up because the loading was so slow, and I just lost like 10 minutes worth of typing. Now that I totally forget what I had said before…. I’m short on money right now, I don’t want to spend a lot of money. I asked for a backup hard drive for Christmas, and I won’t get one if I don’t get one for Christmas. I spent about a total of an hour and a half today looking through magazines at Barnes and Nobles for reviews of the 3870 HD. I only found one that said with the right motherboard you can use CrossfireX but that was all I saw. And also the fact that it is the first video card to acquire DirectX 10.1 and some other awesome specs. What I might do when I get home is remove my documents hard drive to keep that from failing, if it were to get a spark or anything. And then I’ll remove my new 3870 HD and replace it with my old 6800XT and if it works, then I can pretty much guess that I either need a supporting motherboard, a certified power supply and maybe both. When looking through some magazines I came across a really nice ASUS P5K WiFi-AP motherboard. It was pretty cheap, and it had the best rating out of all the other motherboards reviewed. I only have a 750 watt power supply, 3 hard drives, and a 680i SLI motherboard.
What I wanted to ask was if I should either get a new motherboard that supports ATI (lol, I don’t think nVidia and ATI go together) or a new power supply that would be over 900 watts or something. I’ll edit this if I can think of anything else.