Vista - Will a dead secondary hard drive stop Vista from booting?

Today I tried to connect my computer to my HDTV and Vista decided it didn't want to load. It would get the to initial Microsoft Corporation load screen with the scrolling green bar and instantly lock up. Wen't back to my normal 19" monitor and had the same problem.

It would boot into safe mode - after hanging on crcdisk.sys for an extended period of time (around 10 minutes). System restore didn't fix the problem.

I started playing with components which turned out to be a frustrating game of trial and error. I narrowed the issue down to one of my hard drives (I have 4). When it is unplugged, everything is all good. When I connect it again, Vista locks up on boot.

So does Vista point-blank refuse to start if there is a faulty drive in the mix? Keep in mind that all it had on it was movies and games, no crucial system files. And would anybody hazard a guess as to what has happened to the drive, and if it is recoverable. It's a Seagate 500GB. It may be the 7200.11 revision, I'm not totally sure.

Are you running RAID?

No, not at the moment.

It depends on what's wrong with the bad drive. A problem with the PCB (circuit board) could cause signals to/from the drive to be messed up - and it feeds those signals straight into the motherboard.

At work we frequently see issues with bad hard drives that will affect other functions of the system - and the diagnosis is exactly what you've done (pull it out and see).

CRC Disk checks all hard drives.
You could buy a USB to hard drive adapter to access data on the faulty drive...
USB 2.0 to SATA + IDE (2.5 / 3.5 / 5.25") Cable Adapter 2020