Do I have a bad motherboard?

This computer is about a year and a half old. My dad built it, and he's built a couple computers, so I trust his work. I know it has an AMD Athlon processor, a pretty high end ATi video card, 2 ghz of ram, etc. I can get all the part specifics later if that's needed.

Basically what happened with the PC is during video game play, my dad would get a blue screen, and he found that the computer said that there was a hard drive failure. He would have to perform checkdisk to get it running again. This happened a few times. It even happened when he opened up the start menu..again, just a blue screen.

He tried 2 hard drives, both of which were completely fine, and still got the error. He took it to Best Buy to have their techs look at it, and all they told him was it was hard drive failure.

Well, he bought a new computer, and gave me his old one to try and salvage it since my old computer is pretty ancient. I did a fresh install of XP, everything was fine, then I rebooted the computer, and now it's not regognizing a hard drive, and obviously, it says that Windows has not been installed. Should I start out fresh with a new motherboard?

my first assumption is you have a hard drive problem* not mobo
word of advice, best buy (and I shop there too!) never let them tell you whats up , 90% time they have no clue and want to sell you up^....
Hold a bit, someone smarter then me should have a more "experienced" answer for you shortly*... good luck (remember- hard drives are a lot cheaper now than b4)

"not recognizing a hard drive" as in the BIOS doesn't find it?

Try with another hard drive and another cable. It could be that the hard drive controller on the motherboard is acting up. In that case, you don't have to scrap the whole thing. Try another port or get a PCI SATA or IDE controller. The non-RAID ones are dirt cheap.