Linux/Vista Hardware Issues & Booting

I have been struggling with my computer crashing randomly in bothy vista and karmic for about three weeks now and only after two serious days of fighting have I been able to put together a real diagnosis and post. any help is greatly appreciated (pc specs listed in sig):

My computer was screaming about problems with reallocated sector errors in ubuntu (thanks windows for not saying or doing a thing until it was waaay too late). I cloned 1 vista and 1 karmic partition off the failing hard drive to my second hard drive. (it performed a file for file clone, rather than an image). [note: for the Vista partition I had to run chkdsk /r to get it in shape for cloning and it would fail around 150k/180k indices on stage 2, but through some luck booting into vista it started a chkdsk /r off the bat and repaired it before it subsequently crashed.]

I tried wiping and zero erasing the bad hard drive, and have followed up with RMA’ing Seagate because it appears that there is a platter going bad or something. Anyway, so at this point I have one 1T Seagate (dead), one 1T Seagate (healthy), and 1 320gig WD.

I was hoping that I could at least redo the MBR & boot record in order to get the computer to boot into GRUB and give me access to my two OS partitions. This failed. I am not sure how to manually manage this as trying to setup GRUB from a liveCD didn’t get me anywhere even after regenerating the device.map and grub.conf because I still couldn’t root any hard drives. [There was 1 267gig Vista partition, 1 88gig 9.04 Ubuntu partition, and 1 370gig media/apps partition. The files from the media/apps partition (about 80 gig) are also backed up on my second hard drive (the 320 gig WD).]

Basically it seems the current issue is getting a boot sequence in place that mounts the OSs in my system. To try to automagickally flush my MBR and boot sector I installed the beta 1 of 10.04 Ubuntu to a partition on the 320gig WD (the second hard drive). During setup it recognized both of the other OS's and imported their settings. On finish and reboot, however, I got a non-responsive black screen without even a boot error. Then, I used the program Smart Boot Manager to find out if I could at least boot the new Ubuntu partition on its own after hiding the other two; subsequently I tried every variation on boot sequence and availability I could. All met with failed boots.

I saw one thread here talking about people installing Lucid Beta 1 and getting a black screen on reboot and no log in screen and that may be the problem (probably should have added a stable distro), but I have a feeling it is not.