unstable hard drive

Hi,
my hard drive became increasingly unstable recently. It constantly restarted and/or froze up. I have tried using various erase/format/repair disks to no avail. I did seemingly manage to format the drive but reinstalling the os has been fraught with problems. Nothing seems to work.I decided to go back to wins 98 se instead of xp using EZ any install which has always worked before. that was going fine until I had to ' tick the box ' whereupon the mouse pointer refused to move!I am informed at boot up that the clock is wrong and memory is wrong.I can change the clock but how to fix the memory? Disk check says no problems and the drive is not making any painful noises so I am stumped. I can usually fix problems by nuking the drive and starting over but this one is defeating me at every turn. I would be most grateful if anyone can come up with an answer? Many thanks maginty:confused

 

When you tried to install 98SE, was the hard drive formatted in advance?May have been as NTFS.
98SE is FAT32.

 

Hi,
yes, is is or was ntfs. I wish I had not chosen this at my last os install as dban won't work with this and I relied heavily on it when problems arose. I will keep trying with xp which I hate and see where it goes. thanks for your advice. regards maginty