My Poor PC

So, on Monday morning, my hard drive failed. I woke up and went to computer and it had a boot error message on the screen stating there was no boot device, insert media and press a button or restart. I thought well this is just weird, there can't be anything wrong with my new 500 GB Hard drive. So I rebooted and got the same message. Then I powered down and booted back up. This time it worked! I got into windows. Logged in and waited for stuff to start running. Wait. Nothing is starting up. My mouse was still moving, but I couldn't open the start menu, task manager, or anything else. Hmmmm....Maybe I should reboot. I press the reset button on my PC and get the same boot error I got when I sat down! Over the next 2 days, I went on a research rampage trying to find out what is wrong. I searched forums and tech support sites. Rulling out viruses, Vista errors, memory errors, and BIOS errors. It all came down to one thing: the Hard Drive. My brand new, 4-month-old Hard Drive. Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB Hard Drive. I walked through Seagate's step-by-step process of repairing hard drives that won't boot up. Then I got to step 17: return hard drive for replacement under warranty. Damn! I have a 5 year warranty on this hard drive, which means that's how long they guarantee this thing to work. Apparently not mine. My problem now is that I have files on there that I really don't want to lose. I am pretty sure that I have all my pictures that I have taken since I built this PC copied to another PC. But I have programs, website files I've written, and downloads that I would like to recover because I don't want to have to redo everything. I am going to try to install the hard drive in a friend's PC this weekend on the off chance that I can get some files off of it, but it's unlikely. The hard drive seems to stop working after 1-2 minutes of functionality. We'll see. But the fact of the matter is that I will probably lose everything and have to start over. I do have a good plan to move forward with. I will never go without setting RAID up on my main PC. It will cost me an extra hard drive, but that is so worth it. I can't count on parts not failing anymore. I need to have reduncancy, backups, plan B's.