Disk Read Error ..

I built my computer about 8 months ago now, and all has been running well up until two days ago. When I went to start my computer I received a "Disk Read Error". After doing much research I managed to restore the MBR and Boot Loader, and Vista booted fine. It also ran fine for about an hour, then I shut it off and went to bed.

I go to start my machine today to find out that it will start, however when it does I see my desktop for a fraction of a second before receiving a black screen. For whatever reason, explorer refuses to stay open, and constantly keeps crashing. If I'm quick enough, I can launch my browser (it's one of my quick launch icons), however I can do nothing else on the computer really. I tried using the start bar, which will stay on top of the black screen, to no avail.

I then went to the command prompt and tried to access my HDD's to see if they may be failing, although it seems I can browse them fine. I restarted into safe mode, only to have the computer freeze when loading the basic drivers, and go no further.

Now comes the really oddball part. I stick my Vista disk in so I can run its startup check, and it takes forever to load. By forever, I mean a good 20-30 minutes of time just hanging. Even when doing operations on the disk GUI, the computer hangs. This makes no sense to me at all since nothing is loaded into memory, and it's just reading off the disk.

I checked my temperatures and nothing goes above 40C, so my processor isn't overheating like I thought it may be. Unfortunately I have no restore points to go back to (I thought Vista automatically created these every once and a while, I guess not), so I'm stuck troubleshooting what I have.

What I do not want to do is restore my computer. I have far too many programs on the system to be willing to go that far, unless I really had to.

EDIT: Some more info. I have two physical hard drives, partitioned into three logical drives. I can browse one of the drives fine (it's partitioned into two logical parts, both function fine), but if I attempt to do it to the other drive, the computer hangs. Even if I go into the console and try to access the drive, or if I try to scan the drive with my anti-virus, they all hang. I assume this drive is bad.

Would that really cause every other part of my computer to hang? I've always thought if you left the bad drive alone it wouldn't do anything to performance, but I may be finding out otherwise now.