Oh man i've just been through all that crap, crashing, no mouse or kb inputs recognized and bad sector recovery etc.
That's why i always have a slave hd in my case. Makes things so much simpler, faster and easier to back things up regularly.
This time i got caught with a drive with bad sectors and lost control of it.
What i did was go in it in safe mode and reformated the drive.
It seemed to help and hdtach hard drive health results were ok but i know from experience the thing is dying because it is losing/loading it's drivers and crashing regularly.
Having a second drive also simplifies and helps with troubleshooting as you can see if the pc works perfectly with the other drive or not.