Issues after crash

I have a custom built computer with an ASUS P5K3 Deluxe motherboard, 2 GB of Corsair DDR3 RAM, a 250 GB WD hard drive and nVidia 8800gtx video card. I had a dual boot setup with both WIndows XP and Ubuntu 8.10 which was working great. One day I was extracting some rar files (7x1 GB) when i got a blue screen of death(sorry didn't write down the code) but it had deleted the bootloader making it impossible to boot into either XP or Ubuntu. All of my files were backed up so I figured i would just reinstall XP and start over again but when I tried to fromat the HDD (not the quick format) it froze at 26%. I then tried to do a quick format which worked but when i began to update windows and install drivers i got another blue screen of death (sorry again no code but this time it was a kernel issue). I tried to run a disk check which also froze after it was about half way done and had replaced quite a few files. I tried to install Ubuntu next which did install but would get hung up at the beige screen. Ubuntu ran its disk check and it kept reading back [ xxx.xxxxxx](x's were numbers) ata5.00: status: {DRDY ERR } ata5.00: error: {UNC}. Now windows does not even see the hdd when i tried to go back and see if that would work.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I can't because i can't even get an either OS to last more than a few seconds before crashing.