Does this indicate a dead hard drive?

[sctakeshi]

All of a sudden, everything started going really slow, and then all my applications began to soft-freeze. When ev eventually I just got fed up, I turned the computer off and was confronted with the message:

Reboot and Select proper Boot device
or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key

Both of my hard drives check out fine with SMART and both seem to POST, but obviously the computer wohn't boot. Is this indicative of a dead primary HDD? I guess SMART sure is useless.

 

[montag451]

I would replace cables, and check everything is plugged in well.

 

[avey]

Sounds more like a boot file is corrupted or missing. Could also be some corruption in the master boot record. After verifying the cables are good I would try to do a windows repair by booting off the windows cd.

 

[sctakeshi]

Cables seemed okay. I made sure they were seated properly. Drive seems to be getting power, since it POSTs and is seen by BIOS. It's on the same IDE cable as my second HDD, which can be accessed fine (I can read data from it).

So I tried to do a Repair, but Windows can't seem to access the drive at all. The Recovery Console doesn't find any Windows installations (the C: prompt it brings me to references my second HDD), and Windows setup notices that the disk exists but cannot read it:
http://selan.jbcomptech.com:81/files/photo/misc/DSC04801.JPG