Hard drive on dell help please

I am working on a friends Dell that had viruses everywhere on it. I have tried reformatting the old drive. I got a 0x0000007b error when i put the windows XP Pro in that machine. So I put the hard drive in another machine. It went to format it after I removed every partition on the drive. In a different machine it began to format. It went to 40% then a red spot popped up in the progress bar. Then it finished with yellow. After it was done it said there was a error the drive was not formatted. This could be a hardware trouble or a virus. At this point I thought it was a bad drive. I went and got another drive. Stuck it in the Dell with the same error. So I switched it to another machine again. The same red spot appeared in the progress bar. Then saying the bad format message.

Can someone give me any advise? I have tried searching the windows knowledge base with no luck. I will greatly appreciate any help, thanks.