Hard drive is about to fail??

im going to explain how this, internal deformaty occrued. 2 months ago i bought a secondary 160 gig drive I was going to use specifically for gaming, installed xp home, updates, the usual. Since i had just upgraded my pc to a dual core, more ram, better card, the whole 9 yards, I wanted to multi task the hell out of my pc, installing 3 programs at once, downloading 2 games through steam and transfering a few gigs of stuff from a backup drive. This backfired heavily on me, as afterwards, the downloads hanged, and so did the instalations, but pc still ran fine. Restarted, took 5 mins to reach desktop, and another 8 for everything to load. then after using the pc for about 10 mins this lag would eventually cease.
Anyways on to the point, I recently bought vista 64bit, here i was all excited that i was gona get a nice "looking" os, knowing very well my pc can fully support it. took 14 minutes to actually start instalation, didnt know why, then it states my hard drive is about to fail, and recomends me installing the os on another drive. Thinking this is just a computed error, i went through with the instalation. Omfg it took forever, about a full hour, then, my pc would restart every 5 to 10 minutes, regardless of activity, with no patterns, startup and shutdown times were beyond 3 minutes each, download speed was clunked down from my usual 700-800kps to 50-60kps, it felt like i was running a p1 with 64mb of ram on xp pro and trying to make a movie.
I reinstalled twice, hoping it was an error on my part, yet to no avail. I install vista on my other drive, took what, 25 mins ffs? pc runs like a hot knife through butter.

Question, how the crud does a hard drive fudge from multitaking loads of data? isnt this the way of the present and future :S
Neither xp or vista can repair the drive, did a disk check on both os for fun, no bad sectors, bad page files or wtv, nothing, just an arse who cant handle what the future has in store thats apparently on the verge of failing.
Any idea how this actually happened? cause i really dont want it to happen again and i like abusing what i can do, especially if a program insists i close all other programs while instalation is in process , i had no idea hd's could get screwed somehow with excessive unwarrented multi tasking of data transfers

Thank you