New build. Plauged with issues?

Hello. I just completed my build last night, and on that front everything went smoothly, got all the components in and booted up on the first round. Got windows (7 64 bit) installed in about 5 minutes, great. Installed my graphics card drivers from the cd just fine. I couldn't get the internet to work, so I grabbed the motherboard cd and started trying to install the drivers. This is when things started to go horribly, horribly downhill.

The cd immediately started freezing up - even after repeated attempts and reboots. Eventually had to try it in safe mode and go directly to the files to install them, and that seemed to work. Got the internet drivers while in safe mode, along with sound drivers, rebooted and connected to the internet fine. This is where the system started randomly freezing up, requiring a hard reboot, but it wasn't that often, and only when I seemed to be clicking really quickly. I decided to just move forward and see if it worked itself out. I Installed Avast! Anti Virus. Installed my copies of Photoshop and Corel Painter (both from cds, worked fine), hooked up my Cintiq, headphones, external HD, all working great. Installed World of Warcraft, Skype, Chrome. Avast! was being super annoying and I suddenly remembered it was actually Avira that I wanted, so I went to uninstall it. This is when things really started going downhill. Avast! refused to uninstall, freezing up anytime I initiated doing so (the whole system). Even if I just tried to view Avast! from the start menu, as soon as I hovered over the location a magnify glass (searching) image would show up on the icon, like it couldn't find it, but I couldn't close it or open it and it said it was running etc. The same thing happened in safe mode. After a bit of googling I found out there was a program specifically to get rid of Avast! so I grabbed that, ran it in safemode, and it worked. Rebooted.

For about 40 minutes, things seemed to be running smoothly, zipping along just fine, I was drawing a bit in photoshop and playing with the visual settings on Warcraft. Decided to grab Firefox. Installed successfully, but almost immediately after, the system started freezing up again, requiring hard reboots. I ran a few check disk, and it reported back 0 errors. Then, after another freeze, the system started bluescreening immediately after the little swirly windows logo (the welcome screen wouldn't even come-up). I went into the boot screen and turned off automatic restart so that I could read the BSOD and it said:

UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

I could also not boot into safemode, same BSOD. Attempted rebooting a few times with nothing. I put my windows 7 disk back in, and attempted to run a repair. Right away, things were running VERY SLOWLY. It took nearly 15 minutes for the welcome screen of the CD to load. After clicking on repair my computer, it took nearly 35 minutes for it to finish "searching for windows installations", and then it took nearly an hour to finish "searching for problems", and in the end the only thing I got was this (I cannot/do not remember the whole error page, just the bottom section):

Root cause found:
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Bad hard disk:

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There were no error codes or anything so im not even sure that it was saying that was the problem or just a section it puts errors in if there is a problem?

I ran chkdks from the CMD in the repair section, it found nothing wong. I tried rebooting again after this, with the same BSOD. I tried repairing again with the same results. Eventaully, I decided to just reinstall windows, and after an initially long wait for "setting up", it installed very quickly again.

This time I did not put in the motherboard CD and instead just got the internet drivers off another PC with a flash drive. Installed them just fine. Installed everything else like last time just fine. The system has not lagged at all since then, not frozen, responding fast, there are no (and never were) and clicks or noises from my HDD. However, when I woke up this morning windows had an error message waiting for me that said "Windows has detected a hard disk error", and expanding the info it is pointing to my new HD (I have an external hooked up, too), saying that it was about to fail. I had to go cook, so I closed out the error and came back about 2 hours later to the message on my screen again. I went and downloaded the Western Digital Lifeguard Diagnostics tool, right away the SMART test was saying X FAIL in red next to my HDD before I even did a scan. I attempted to run a quick scan and after a few seconds it comes back and says ""Quick Test on Drive 1 did not complete! Status Code =07 (Failed test element), Failure Checkpoint = 97 (Unknown Test), Smart Test did not complete."

At this point like I said I am having no issues other than the error message popping up.. so obviously something is wrong, still. I've initiated another check disk at this point, and it's still running; it's been an hour now, it is at 14% of stage 5 of 5 with no errors, but this is the longest the chkdsk has ran since the start of all of this.

I did run the mem diagnostics test from .. the boot screen or repair cd? Cant remember where it was located. There were no errors with it.

So, IS my HDD failing, was it bad when I got it? Or is it the motherboard? Or is it a driver thing, or software? Like I said...after not using that motherboard CD, things have been absolutely fine, nothing wrong at all, expect that error has popped up twice and the HDD is not passing smart test...One thing to note is that, perhaps mistakenly, I did not format the drive before installing the first time - could this be the cause of all these problems?

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(As I am typing this out, chkdsk has reached 18% and finally has done something, saying it

replaced bad clusters in file 76315 of name \PROGRA~2\Adobe\ADOBED~1\Required\authplay.dll

replaced bad clusters in file 76319 of name \PROGRA~2\Adobe\ADOBED~1\Required\Opera\Opera.dll

File data verification completed, chkdks is verifying free space

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For more info, here are all the components in the computer - just bought from Newegg 3 days ago, no bloatware or anything -
ASRock H77 Pro4-M LGA 1155 Intel H77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
Intel Core i5-2400 Sandy Bridge 3.1GHz (3.4GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor
Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Desktop Memory Model F3-8500CL7Q-16GBRL
EVGA 01G-P3-1556-KR GeForce GTX 550 Ti (Fermi) FPB 1GB 192-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0
Diablotek 450 watt PSU
SAMSUNG 22X DVD Burner SATA Model SH-222BB/BEBE
Windows 7 64 Bit Home Premium