imac 24" 2008 hd dead- at least

[almiroty]

hi:
my imac 24" 2008 had been unused for over a year- big flood in my place, high humidity all around.
i tried booting, got the gray screen with the apple and the swirling gray ball.
booted out of the hardware test and passed both the short and long test. tried booting again, same results.
booted from original disks to reinstal system. hd showed greyed out. tried disk utility, but only shows hd as "media" w/out any other info. tried disk warrior. it could ot find a hd. looked at the about this apple, no hd found.
my friend did a safe boot and fixed all he could think and rebooted. still got to the grey screen w/apple and the gray ball.
tried booting off an external hd that has the back up clone for my macbook pro 13 " but got nowhere.
i believe that at least the hd is kaput. any other ideas?
thanks

 

[harcosparky]

If you have another external HDD around try hooking that up and installing the OS to that.

If that still doesn't work then the problem is deeper than just the drive.

 

[almiroty]

If you have another external HDD around try hooking that up and installing the OS to that.

If that still doesn't work then the problem is deeper than just the drive.

it should boot from any sata usb drive?
tia
g

 

[almiroty]

If you have another external HDD around try hooking that up and installing the OS to that.

If that still doesn't work then the problem is deeper than just the drive.

ok, it boots! and now i can hear the click of death from the internal hd.
i fear there is a problem with the dvd drive also. i was installing the original disks into the external usb drive and all went well until i had to take #1 out to install #2. the internal dvd drive would not respond. thinking that i was so smart, i decided to use an external dvd drive that i have to install disk #2. it started well, but then i got an error. i then booted again with the installation disk #1 on the external drive and was able to do the installation. i left the machine working- downloading updates for quite a while without any problems.
ideas on what to do?
thanks!
g