Is my HDD dead?

[themaund]

I own a Dell Inspiron N5110 laptop, that I got in September 2012. A year later after the warranty expired Windows was giving me some trouble. I was not surprised in the least and figured it was my HDD. I ended up reinstalling Windows and everything was fine up until a week or 2 ago. I started getting boot up issues with Windows 7 again. I tried to reinstall again, which worked for a day and back to boot up issues. When I ran diagnostics it said the HDD was not detected. The Fixed HDD would read none, etc. But with some tinkering around and restarting I could get it to start up, I'm typing this on my laptop now. So this makes me wonder, is my HDD really dead or did I just make a mistake when installing windows? Definitely would love to save some money from buying a new drive. Thanks!

 

[i7Baby]

Can you see it in bios?

In Control Panel, Device Manager?

In Windows Explorer?

Can you do a Checkdisk with Repair?

Have you done a virus scan? eg Avast, Malwarebytes

Does Seatools find errors? (If WD, use WD Diagnostics)