if not two hard drives broken one after another, then what ?

After breakdown of windows xp by user mistake, windows 7 on a different internal hard drive also stopped working. Both drives are wd caviar, one 12 years old, theother maybe 8.

as i tried to reinstall windows 7 on the older, the system refused, saying the drive was about to die.

so i replaced the older one with a newer one and once again, neither xp nor 7 can be installed.

when i try to format the second one with dos version of paragon hdm, i get i/o error.

Theoretically, this can be a conincidence of two drives dying in a row, but how about some other reasons? what else could result in such disk malfunction. and what steps to take?

could a malfunct mobo or controller mess up my data on those disks and others when doing just reading operations, like test the surface?

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