Is my harddrive DOA?

[kazilan]

I just finished building a new computer, first time builder, and don't know if there's something I'm missing or if my hdd is toast out of the box (or if something else is wrong). I have a seagate 1 TB Barracuda LP harddrive and a gigabyte H67M-D2 motherboard (one of the recalled ones, but can't return it yet) and have it connected to the sata 0 port (one of the 'good' 6gb/s ports). When I turn on the computer it goes to BIOS fine, but trying to load my windows 7 disc for installation gets me a "disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter" message. In frustration I fiddled with some BIOS settings and accidentally changed to an AHCI setup, which recognized the CDROM in the sata 1 slot and got as far as the windows loading screen, but didn't see the hdd in the sata 0 spot.

I'm guessing its the harddrive as it seems it wasn't recognized in either configuration (I've switched the settings back to default from AHCI and still get the error message). The IDE master/slave slots are empty with auto detect turned on, and I tried changing the boot order to use the CDROM first, to no effect (the cd drive does spin when I put the disc in, though).

As a final note, my hdd clicks a few times at power up, so I know it's getting power. It's not a ton of clicking, so I don't know if that's a bad sign (clicks of doom) or a good sign (clicking as it powers up). The sata cable is secure (checked it twice) and I don't have a backup cable to try but don't know the likelihood of that as the culprit. I appreciate any advice; yes, I'm a frustrated newbie.

 

[davcon]

Put the hard drive C: as the 1st device in boot priority.
Then boot from cd/dvd.
disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter generally means the system found no O/S to boot
Causes:
A diskette or CD has remained in the drive
Check if DVD-ROM are present in respective drives, remove them and restart your computer
The boot sequence is incorrect in the BIOS
Enter the BIOS setup of your computer and edit the boot (boot sequence) so that the computer starts primarily on drive C:

In the case that a new hard drive has been installed, this message is quite normal.
Just insert the correct CD to install the system (usually Windows), then restart, while making sure the CD-ROM is first in the defined in the BIOS setup as first boot sequence.

If the hard disk or a partition is damaged:
If it detected in the BIOS setup, there is a chance that it is
not out of service.
If it is, try reinstalling the system through the installation CD, in order to reformat

 

[kazilan]

I tried changing the boot priority so the CDROM is first after trying the HDD first with the same results. I don't see anywhere in the BIOS where it recognizes that there is a harddrive or a CDROM drive, but both make noise when I power on the computer. I don't know anything about BIOS settings and am nervous about changing things there - "load optimized defaults" hasn't helped either.

When I use the CDROM drive as first priority, should it still boot with the windows disk to -something- even if no hdd is recognized?