Hard drive dead?

[rob4001]

I have a WD5000AAKS with windows vista on it. Vista seemed to crash with blue screen of death all the time so presumed vista must be crap. Happily for me I've got 2 hard disks one with xp on so carried on with xp. But as XP wont use 4GB. So after few month thought I'd have another go with vista so decided to reformat and re-install, this is when hard drive problems started

I tried formatting and got message: first boot sector is unwritable and second boot sector unwritable.
running chkdsk. Disc is now in RAW and cant be re formatted. Now its disappeared from my computer on rebooting checked all cables etc.

After googling it seems that maybe hard disk faulty. I thought WD were pretty good in general, anyway maybe my vista problems were hard drive related all along.

So does it sound like a dead hard drive?

[Zero 101]

Better to ask here or d/l disk checking sw. But it does sound as if its dying.
http://support.wdc.com/?wdc_lang=en