Is my hard drive dead

[hatred]

I just bought a dell as my pc & next day i found the hard drive cracking. If i hook it into my computer i am able to see it in bios & it shows up in the post but when i go to windows i cant see to find it. It is being hooked up as the secondary drive. It cannot be booted into windows if I hook it as primary but it will show in bios. On the norton go back screen it comes but it restarts onto the xp screen & it will continously do that if you wont turn it off. It has got a lot of stuff inside that is needed & also no backup was made. Is it something to do with norton screwing it or the hard drive is dying or dead already? Also, i need a tool to take out all the data if possible & also if it is free then it would be great.
Please help me with all the advice that you can offer. Thanks

[unidentified]

You can recover the bad sectors on the hard drive with a tool called SpinRite.

[ApPy10]

Did you assign it a drive letter by going into disk management?

[hatred]

If i am not able to see the drive then how would i go about assigning it a drive letter?

[T.J.]

I think someone fiddled with Norton Ghost by backing up the drive and a boot partition got created by norton to run the backup if i am not wrong. It dosent delete the boot partition if the backup fails & therefore it tries to boot into DOS I guess & fails & tries again. Did you try running fdisk and delete the first partition by booting the pc into DOS with a flash drive or floppy drive or you can even try to make the second pne active. Ensure that the first partition is a nortont partition which is only a couple of mb.