Hard Drive

I First had to Hard Drives the one of them that had windows installed (98) used to hang mid way throu boot up with the error “windows protection error” that hard disk crashed, Now i use the second harddisk,and it is giving me the same error, and hangs it has twice said that it is unable to boot from C:\ but worked after i restarted.. ? is there any chance of this harddisk failing , and if i format will it help ? please advise