Has my hard drive failed?

I have an iMac (I think it's an '09?) that has been my workhorse at home. I keep the latest OS on it.  It's quite full - has lots of photos from past 12 years, and lots of iTunes ripped stuff, etc. (yes, I have at least most of it on Time Machine).
For the past week or so, I had trouble with it temporarily freezing or locking up. The mouse would work fine, but no software functioning. It would happen every 10 min or so no matter what software I was using. I was so busy, I tolerated it, and didn't try to fix it.  It seems like the "last straw" was that I sync'd my iPhone, downloaded more photos (and deleted them on said phone - boy, am I hoping Time Machine and/or Photostream caught them!)
Now, I can't get it to start up in any way, except I can get it to boot from an install disk.  When I tried Disk Utility from there, it showed only the DVD drive - no hard drive...
When it starts up, I generally just get a gray screen.  Nothing happens.
I've gone through about the first 4 steps of this page, but I can't get my Apple Hardware Test to load from my gray Disk 2.  Eventually, I get the folder flashing with the question mark when trying that...
No Apple store within reasonable driving distance, though I do have a authorized service provider.
I'd prefer to try to fix it myself - have done so on several others. I'd like to save both data and money if I can.  But I'm kinda stumped as to what is going on.  I'm really hoping of course, that my drive didn't die - if that's a possibility, how could I know??
I reset the NVRAM/PRAM and I'm wondering if it's possible that caused it not to recognize the drive?? Is that possible?
Help!

You said you keep the latest OS on it. If that is OS X 10.8.x (Mountain Lion) or 10.7.x (Lion) you should have a Recovery partition on the drive, so you can try starting up from it by holding down command + R on startup. If that works, run Disk Utility & see if the iMac's normal startup partition is shown in the First Aid tab. If so, try to run a Repair Disk on it. (Step by step instructions can be found here.)
Note: if this doesn't work, you still may be able to start up from a Recovery partition on your Time Machine backup. Try starting up while holding down the option key with the TM drive attached to your iMac. If you see a startup choice with a name matching that of the TM drive, that is its copy of the Recovery partition. (See the green box here for more about that.)
If you do not have Lion or Mountain Lion installed this won't work. Please let us know which OS you have.

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