[DFI] lanparty crashing my hard drives?

I have a DFI Lanparty nF4 expert motherboard and was running my apps/games from a WD Raptor with a Barracuda drive mainly for media storage. Two months ago, without warning, my Windows XP pro just locked up. Upon cold boot, I ran into a TON of issues....from the bios not seeing the hard drives on boot, to seeing both the next, then to seeing just one on another bootup. Bios was switching which disk to boot from as well and sometimes would recall which i selected, other times it wouldn't.

I ran every disk util under the sun and finally wound up accessing my media partition [thankfully!] through Ubuntu Live CD to backup my family pics that I couldn't get to through windows. Even then I ran into some issues...I was able to access my Raptor through Ubuntu but not my Barracuda and vice versa with using Knoppix Live CD.

In the end, I wound up 86ing the Raptor and installing Win XP 64 dual booting with Ubuntu on the second drive. Things were working fine until 2 weeks ago, my drive started to make a noise as if it was running but making a noise [not a crunching nor a whirring....can't describe it. Lets just say it was noticeable and random in it's 'noise making'].

Just now one of my games was acting up so I decided to blow out my comp and reapply some AC5 on the GPU...upon boot, my windows XP just cycle reboots. Can't boot into any form of Windows and even when I try to use the recovery from the CD, it just reboots. I can access Ubuntu [which I am on now] with no problem but cannot mount my Windows partition [not that I really care to as I learned my lesson last time and partitioned more carefully this time around].

Sorry....but what I want to know is.............is it possible for my motherboard to be crashing my hard drives somehow? I find it highly odd that both my hard drives are experiencing the same issues with different OSes loaded on them. Yes I kept my comp virus free and scanned often as well.