How can a Hard or Floppy drive cause the system to hang and stop working?

I have two hard drives (80 Seagate 7200 %26amp; 120 Maxtor 7200 with 8MB Buffer for both of them) and a floppy drive 3.5';. Recently when I want to read or write a floppy disk, as

soon as I insert the disk I hear a click sound from my Maxtor hard drive (Not the click sound of the FDD) and with that sound my computer will not work anymore and the Red LED for HDD won't turn off. I disconnected the FDD, but when I wanted to write something on the Maxtor HDD I heared that sound again and the hole system stoped too. On day I changed my OS accidentally from Windows XP to Knopix (A live version of Linux) and there I tried to copy something from it, I heared that sound again and saw a warning that said your hard drive stalled. But the system didn't stop and after about 30 seconds it started to to copy from that time that it stoped!

What is the problem?

My OS? (I don't think so)

My Floppy Drive? or My Maxtor Hard Drive?

I also disconnected th Maxtor HDD but the FDD caused stop again!How can a Hard or Floppy drive cause the system to hang and stop working?
Initially I would have said that it was your harddrive begining to fail but if it is happening when the maxtor HDD is disconnectd It could be the motherboard IDE controller failing or simply the IDE drivers - do you have the mobo disk ?How can a Hard or Floppy drive cause the system to hang and stop working?
A clicking sound on a hard drive is the sigh of the hard is going out...Joe