bad hdd?

Specs
corsair 650w power supply
asus p5nsli mobo
nvidia 8400gs pcie video
1gb ddr2 pny memory
wester digital sata 320 gb hdd

minor back story
had similar issues described below briefly upon first installing windows xp but the crazy boot times went away and all seemed well for a few months, till I got a virus and had to reformat..anyways

Issues
Weird format progress during Windows XP install. Getting from 0% to 1% takes nearly half an hour, the speed steadily picks up a bit after that. This step always works up until booting into windows, where I either wait an excessive amount of time for the first grey-on-black load bar and finally make it to the windows xp logo and blue scrolling load bar where on one occasion I let it sit there all night, didn't freeze but it just kept on scrolling, if i can recall the hdd light wasn't blinking at that time. After getting completely mixed and matched results, loading into windows freezing 30 seconds later, freezing before seeing any load bars I decided to install Ubuntu, the original OS on the computer when I first got it. No problems whatsoever with Ubuntu, decided to get some hdd scan software, picked up gSmartControl and ran into badblocks along the way.

Results from both programs
first I ran backblocks as such, I am very poor with linux so i used the simplest command I found
sudo badblocks /dev/sda1

the computer periodically loses functionality while the hdd is being scanned, the terminal returns these numbers

I am pretty sure these are bad sectors as far as I know.

Then I ran gSmartControl, results below

Most notable results are the consistent test failures and the pre failure old age classification on like every smart category.

At this point I think I just got lucky earlier, successfully installing windows, properly booting, installing drivers, rebooting multiple times even with weirdly long boot times, still succeeding and the drive is finally crippling like a punctured submarine?

Questions
Would the sata cable have any effect, it's the same one that came with it.
What other diagnostic stuff could I do or anything to possibly fix the hdd.


Thanks for reading