Dead hard drive or just deep coma?

I'm not finding the answer to this anywhere, although "I think I killed it" comes close
My iMac goes to kernel panic almost immediately after boot. Chime, initial screen, then the gray panic screen.
Booting from an external HD initially showed the drive as mounted. Disk Utility and Disk Warrior found errors, that were then repaired. Now, though, the drive doesn't mount. Disk Utility doesn't list it as an option. Booting from an installer CD first shows it as an available drive, then tells me it can't be used.
I've tried resetting the PMU and zapping the PRAM.
Oddly, shortly after booting off the external, I can hear the internal HD spin down, which makes me think it's some kind of access error.
But it may be the internal drive has gone bad.
Any ideas? I can probably break it open and install a new HD, but that looks pretty tricky, and I'd like to be more sure that's the problem before I go in.

It's almost certainly just the hard drive then. 
The Mac tests the RAM during the Power On Self Test(you'd hear beeps rather than the normal Start-Up chime.
To test the RAM further (seems unlikely to be the problem though) you can use Rember. If the computer functions fine running from the external then I'm sure it's the internal hard drive (which, as a mechanical device, is far more prone to failure than solid state devices like RAM or logic boards). Which luckily is a relatively cheap and simple fix.
mrtotes

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