Clicking noise coming from 1 of 3 internal hard drives, got a winload.exe error on reboot and now al

[chickenfanny]

I've tried switching around the HDD order. My main drive is a 1TB win 7 ultimate x64, there's a 500GB Vista drive from my old computer which I now use for storage and a 320GB Ubuntu drive.

Specs are:

Coolermaster 1000 case
Corsair TX-750w power supply
i7 920 with Corsair H80 cooling unit
Nvidia GTX 580
and Corsair 1600 6GB ram

Did a memtest, all clear. Tried booting up the linux drive, it booted up properly then froze. When I try to boot up the windows drives, it either crashes on the boot menu (start safe mode, start windows normally etc) or will start the windows loading screen indefinitely. Is it possible all 3 hard drives failed at once? Or does one bad drive affect the others? Or is it something else entirely?

Thanks for the help, let me know if there's some more troubleshooting I should do.

[Rome]

All 3 have not failed synchronously for independent reasons. That's good news for you. The bad news is that this may take a considerable amount of troubleshooting. First things first, have you tried defaulting your BIOS settings? That alone is probably not going to fix it, but it's always good to eliminate bad settings as a suspect.

When it displays the Safe Mode prompt on your Windows drives, that's not a crash. That's what Windows displays when it detects that the system was shut down improperly, usually because of a crash or hard reset. You should try Safe Mode and see if there's a difference, since a driver may be at fault.

[bohb]

The thing about IDE/SATA controllers is that they're dumb. One dead drive screaming some error or taking exorbitant amounts of time to do some task can lock up the entire system.

You should pull all of the drives and only plug in one at a time to see which one is causing problems. There's a program called Spinrite that can do low level surface scans of drives to detect defects or other S.M.A.R.T. problems.

[moesislack]

Which drive has grub on it?
If it's the one that failed you need to install grub to another drive with a live cd.
But do what bohb said as well.