System hung while reformatting, now HDD fails

My friend bought a 2010 Macbook Pro (9,2) from someone and asked me to wipe it clean for her. It was working fine but it was noticeably slow. I proceeded to clear the PRAM by holding command + option + P + R while booting. Mac restarted as expected, so far so good.

I then booted into recovery mode by holding command + R. I opened Disk Utility and formatted the drive. It went smoothly, I would say it took 30 seconds. Then I went to install OSX Lion (the current OS on the MPB) and it asked me to connect to wifi. I did and it estimated 43 minutes until completion. After about 15 minutes I got an error saying it was unable to get all the contents for OSX Lion.

At this point it obviously wouldn't boot off the HDD because I had formatted it and the install of Lion failed. I reformatted it one more time and tried to install Lion again. It failed again with the same message. It was at this point that the HDD started to fail.

I rebooted into recovery and the drive was not present in disk utility. I rebooted once more and the drive had appeared, however this time and every time since then it would fail to format the drive. It would get stuck at 50%. I waited for a while and eventually did a forced shutdown. Can this damage a hard drive? I tried over and over again to get the drive formatted with no luck.

I had a bootable USB lying around with Mavericks on it that was created with Unibeast. I tried installing off the USB and it failed after a period of time.

Then I took the HDD out of the MPB and stuck it into my main rig (hackintosh). When I booted up it took longer than usual (30 seconds) to get past the AHCI screen where the computer detects the drives. I did this in order to determine whether it was a faulty HDD cable in the MPB that was causing intermittent problems.

It appears to me that the HDD is toast. However it was running fine until I tried to format it. Any ideas on what to try?

TL;DR Tried clean install of Lion and HDD hangs at 50% when formatting.

 

Thanks for the quick reply guys. Now to break the bad news..

 

I used a tool called DriveDx. I don't know how accurate this software is but it reported like 1836 bad sectors!!!