Can the computer itself make a HDD go bad?

Craigslist had an immaculate iBook G4 in my area for short money and I was able to score it for my kids to use. We use it to play music and movies and games. It had a 30G HDD but everything started to act up. Programs would just close during use, and then all I could get was the startup sound, a grey screen and the Apple with the spinning wheel.

So I decided to replace the HDD with one (250G) from my old iBook G4 that worked, however the logic board was failing me.

Everything was fine for the first 3 times I used the computer, then it started to act up in the same way it did when I had the 30G HDD in there. I reset the PRAM and the PMU already.

What else do I do?