Macbook Wont boot from hard drive. Help??

I was typing on my Macbook and the whole computer just froze with the rainbow wheel. So i hold down the power button to force a shut down. When i try to boot it back up it game me a Apple logo but then turn into a X. I try to turn it on holding down the Option key and only the recovery HD came up. Then i try to install Osx onto the Hard drive and it wont recognize it. Then i went to disk utility and The HD is Grey out then i Try Repair Disk but it doesnt work and gives me errors. Then i plug in a different Hard Drive and it Boot Up fine so i know its not the computer its the hard drive issue. Btw i used a software to recover the files and everthing showed up so the content is still there but the software cost $99 to use and im not paying that much. Does anyone know how to solve this Issue? I have important files on it. If the hard drive is dead then is there any free software that i can use to recover the files?

Since you were able to read at least some of the files, I'm thinking you may have an issue with the SATA cable, which is fairly common. The easy test is to pull the hard drive and put it in an external enclosure. If it works, the SATA cable is probably the issue.
Is it a 13 or 15 inch?

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