Disk utility can't find HDD

Hello,
I was playing music on my macbook 13" early 2011 and all of a sudden it stopped playing. After I logged in to my account on my mac the screen froze so I decided to do a reboot. After I tried to restart all I got as a folder with a question mark in it. I did my research and did many attempts on fixing it but disk utility just couln't find my macintosh HD. After reading lots about this problem on the web I installed a new (empty) HDD but still disk utitlity wasn't able to find it so I could not install OSX.
Can anybody help me, is it the HDD or something else and how can I solve this problem?
Thanks in advance!
Victor Verdonschot

Hello,
I put the original HDD in an external case. Tried to boot from there and as it seems it works fine. But it still can't find the internal HDD.
Any help?
Thanks in advance.
Victor Verdonschot

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