How can I be sure my hard drive is "dead?"

Last week my internal drive on my G5 stopped functioning. It is the OEM drive. it was running fine and then the system seemed to freeze up. Upon rebooting, the drive was no longer recognized through Disk Utility. Fortunately, my data was backed up on the external firewire drive I'm booting from now.
The drive was also making a funny noise when it was still in the tower. (you can hear it here: http://homepage.mac.com/tsnouffer/HDSound.mov )
I've removed the drive and reattached it with no change in recognizing it thought Disk Utility. I've recset PRAM too.
What else, if anything, can I do to check to make sure the drive is in fact dead?
Thanks
-Ty
PM G5 Dual 2.3Ghz   Mac OS X (10.4.7)  

If a disk won't mount, then even trying from the command line and in Single User Mode may not help. Sometimes an (external) hot-swap case can be of use. There are now some (slowest USB) "kits" for emergencies that can connect to ATA and SATA drives.
there is also a stand-alone device from Data Rescue (use to be called DiscJockey) that can do sector copies.
I no longer use TTPro because I don't want something running backgroup tasks or that even installs into the system (and has hooks). I do use SoftRAID (3.5 from www.softraid.com ) which will immediately alert you on disk I/O errors and problems (and email probably). I focus on testing up front when I buy a drive and then on a 6 month or yearly basis before problems arise. Kicking the tires then for however long to run the speedtools suite fully. I rarely find the need to repair a drive (knock on wood!).
As long as RAM and cpu are up to snuff (sans ECC though) and you test the drive 100% before using it, then it is just a matter of regular backups, maintenance. And restore your system 'as needed.'
ZoneBench was included probably 2005, maybe slightly earlier, but I find it a really useful tool now.

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