Hard Drive Dying?

[theeassassin]

I have a 250gb WD SATA drive, ~5years old, been great, quiet still. Was dual booting XP/Win 7, XP started freezing and then stopped booting (at windows load screen and computer restarts). So didnt mess around with anything and just was using windows 7, well about 5 months later now windows 7 wont boot, same thing. Backed up all my data using ubuntu live. When trying to install windows 7 again no hard drive was showing up, and the mobo bios saw a "33.8gb" hard drive...? Went into ubuntu whipped drive clean and it was registering right and got windows 7 to install and run once before it wouldnt boot. Tried again same thing. Decided just to install ubuntu and it was working thru about 10 startups and now that wont boot 'error 18'....some of the time drive was showing up in bios and in ubuntu as 33.8gb... I am assuming that the hard drive is just dying...Any Ideas? thanks

 

[madass]

Yep....its dying. My old 40GB IDE drive did something simillar.