IMac Not Booting - Probable Hard Drive Failure

Hello, my 24" iMac (Early 2008) has stopped booting up, and I've been suspecting HDD failure. When it boots, it gets to the white screen, I get some weird noise from the drive, and then a floppy disk with a question mark appears.
I inserted and booted from the Mac OS X install disk, and the only instance where it even recognizes the existence of a hard drive is when it is indicated as "Media" and is described having a capacity of zero bytes.
I'm just trying to confirm that the problem is the hard drive, and see if I did the right thing by buying a new Hard Drive. The disk doesn't show up in disk utility or when I choose to restore from a time machine backup (luckily, I lost no data with my Time Machine backups).
I appreciate any advice you can give (including tips on the hard drive replacement procedure).

If you ran Disk Utility from the install disc that came with the computer and it cannot see the HD then it appears it's the internal HD. You can also run AHT, here are the instructions:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1883
I believe AHT will let you know the HD has failed. As far as instructions for replacing the HD it's not for the faint of heart, if you are comfortable working on notebook computers then you could probably do it. Remember internally an iMac is more like a notebook than a PC. If you are not comfortable doing this type of surgery (BTW there are many videos on how you can find using Google) then it should only be about a $200-300 repair from a AASP.
Regards,
Roger

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