Re: HDD is dead 
I know exactly how it feels been there myself..
I had this SATA drive from Maxtor, not so old even. And one day while I was away damn Norton started a Virus scan, and when I got back it was stuck while scanning and so I had reset, and since then I tried everything, it was not even dead like in your case. But I could never find out what happened. All data lost, it was 120Gig.
I learnt my lesson, now I wont let it happen to me again, I backup all important data on DVD’s and stuff.