Hard drive doesn’t format

When I tried to format the drive in Windows ME, I get a blue screen and system lock. I booted using a boot disk, tried formatting it through DOS, appears to format fine, the percentage counter goes up and I the summary at the end, however, all the data is still on the drive. I can view directories on the drive but if I try to access any files the system crashes (windows). I tried to fdisk the drive and that too appeared to work, but after a restart everything was still there. Any ideas how to format the drive and make it usable, or is my suspicion of the drive being at the end of its life accurate???