Hard Drive Disk Error Occurred

This is kinda long and I've fixed it, but could use your input. So after waking up, my parents informed me that the computer was shutting down randomly. I turned it on and "a disk error occurred press ctrl+alt+del to restart " appeared. It's a Sata hard drive so I checked the cables to make sure they were plugged in correctly and they were, and then I tried connecting it to another computer with that computers cables and that didn't work either. My parents not wanting to buy one online, decided to just go to bestbuy and buy one there, since we already had the Windows 7 Disk at home. I formatted it, partitioned it, and installed Windows 7 Home Premium on it and everything worked. I decided to connect the Hard drive that didn't work while the computer was still on, and it immediately started downloading the drivers it needed and up popped all the hard drive. I'm going to start transferring all the important things like music,videos and games, and after, all I can see are the following 3 things; after getting all the data we want off it, should I reinstall windows to see if my other computer will recognize it (Even though it couldn't before), format it and just use it as extra data (though since it already couldn't boot up, the ability to keep data on it may fail in a couple of days/weeks) or just put it away and not use it at all.