I recently had an HDD stop spinning and loc...

I recently had an HDD stop spinning and lock up on me. I saved what data I could and purchased a new one. Within hours of installing it the same issue arose; I figured it was bad luck and had it replaced. Now I'm on another new hard drive, just started trying to install my nvidia drivers (182.50 for 9800GTX) and the drive started playing up again. I stopped installing the drivers and everything seems stable for now. I'm wondering if the driver might be corrupt and need re-downloading (it was retrieved from the original hard drive that failed) or perhaps there's an issue with my motherboard. It's hard to tell if it's the motherboard because my second hdd hasn't had any problems that I've noticed.

I just tried to install a fresh download. It did the same thing during installation then came up with a "network error when trying to read from C: drive" message. I ran the western digital quickscan on it and it didn't report any problems. What are the chances this is a motherboard problem, rather than a hdd problem? I need to get my computer back up and running for work asap but don't want to spend hundreds on hardware that I don't need so any advice is good.

And the hdd has now started freezing up for a few seconds randomly, not very often, maybe once every 20 minutes.

Thanks for the help.