Possible bad MOBO/Sata Controller ? or 2 dead hard drives out of box?

Hi,
I attempted to help save my grandfather in law some money when he told me he was going to have to have windows reinstalled on his computer. I told him I would do it for free, having formatted and re-installed windows a number of times. Here is as concise as I can be what happened -

Computer is a hp p6631p running windows 7 home premium
1)No bootable recovery disk or HD sector, created bootable USB using ISOs off windows website for 7 home premium

2)Opened up command line using Shift+f10 when computer booted to windows install

3)ran diskpart command - attempted to clean all, then format and create partition
-Clean all command took 2 days for 1 TB WD blue (this was not stock HD as he had already had it replaced, computer is only 4 years old and not heavily used)
-format (NTFS) took again around 17 or 18 hours ? Seemed unusually long to me

4)installed windows
-after booting for the first time windows ran VERY slowly. basically it was unusable.
-suspect HD failure, created bootable USB with Western Digital's diagnostics on it

5)booted to WD diagnostics, ran quick test, got a read head error
-ran extended test, received the "too many errors, replace drive" code

6)purchased a TB WD black off newegg to replace blue drive.

7)installed drive, and attempted to create partition using disk part to install windows on, received an I/O error. Was able to run clean command, but could not create the primary partition.

8)Ran smart test from BIOS, received read head error

Drive/Sata controller is set to AHCI. I attempted to plug the HD into another sata port on the MOBO and had the same result on the smart test. Have not tested HDs in my PC to see if I get the same errors. Does this indicate issues with the MOBO/Sata Controller ? or can anyone point me to what the problem could be ? Should I try a different SATA cable ? Any help you guys could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Hey thanks for the replies. I went ahead and tried a different sata cable and also put the HD in my PC and received no errors on a smart check. I also tried all of the different sata ports on the MOBO. I also can not get bootable windows CDs to work without freezing up, and from what I see in the bios despite their being 4 sata ports on the MOBO there only seems to be one option for SATA controller. Is there anything else I can do besides replacing the MOBO ? I seriously doubt its worth it to replace the MOBO on a 5 year old HP PC. Thank again in advance.

might also be the psu.

slimjim4567 said:

I seriously doubt its worth it to replace the MOBO on a 5 year old HP PC.

As the saying goes: No good deed goes unpunished. :)

Depending on where you want to cut your losses with your grandfather, this is not necessarily the end of the road. While it would not be practical to replace the onboard controller, you could replace the motherboard - probably for under $100 - which is well below the price of a replacement computer. Not much more work than you have already been through!

Thanks for the replies. Im going to mark this as solved. I may hunt around to or contact HP to see if I can get this exact MOBO. I also have a PSU I can swap and try to see if that makes any diff. He has a laptop and it has all his backed up data on it so I may just see how far he wants to take this.