Is my iMac hard drive dead?

[supersoyary]

I have the first-release aluminum iMac with 320gb hard drive. Today, it decided to die on me, or so I think. Can you confirm what this means?:

Notes: The drive name turned to "Media" and available space is 0 bytes. Also, in System Profiler, when I click on Serial ATA to check, it says "There was an error while scanning for Serial-ATA devices."

As you can see, I decided to install OS X on my external firewire drive. Not the fastest thing around, but it works. Any solutions on how to fix my original hard drive, or is it dead? I'm scared to open up my iMac to replace it, though it's long been out of warranty. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

What exactly did your drive do to "die"?

If it is a mechanical failure, you could try recovering data with Data Rescue 2.

Running the Apple Hardware Test from the system DVD could confirm hard drive damage.

 

[supersoyary]

It started with my computer freezing up when I did anything that involved disk access with large amounts of data (e.g. iPhone backups, file downloads from the net) and then it went to intermittent cycles of the folder with question mark showing up at boot. Eventually, all that stopped and I couldn't even save it with DiskWarrior, since the drive won't even show up.

I'm going to try to use the Apple Hardware Test you suggested. Thanks.