Sorry for the delay in getting this answer to you….

There are a variety of tools available to you which can assist in determining whether or not the physical disk drive is bad.

First I would determine whether or not the system BIOS (setup) routine actually recognizes the hard drive or not. Go into your system setup (the F10, F1 and F2 keys are commonly used to enter the system BIOS: your particular keystroke or keystroke combination may well differ) and look at the system which contains the listing of ATA and/or SATA devices. Is your hard drive listed? If so, it’s “live”… It still may not work, but the drive is electrically active at the controller. If no drive is found, it is most likely “toast” (in other words, non-functional). If the drive IS indeed found, proceed with the next step.

Determine the brand of the hard drive (Seagate, Hitachi, Toshiba, Western Digital,,, there are others…) and look at the manufacturers website for their diagnostic tools (SeaTools from Seagate, Drive Fitness Test from Hitachi, WD Diag from Western Digital, etc…). Download the appropriate file for your floppy or CD and create the floppy or CD boot disk. Start from this disk and run the diagnostics test. If it fails, your hard drive is, as mentioned before, “Toast”. If it checks out, the issue is probably with your O/S