SATA Drive not recognized

SATA drive in a store bought Dell computer it's about two years old it had been working fine and now the drive is not being recognized by the BIOS. The first time it gave me the error message I restarted the computer and everything was fine but now the error persists. I have tried connecting the SATA to a different port and a different power connector but still nothing. I installed a ide hard drive and even that couldn't pick up the drive. Unfortunatley I don't have another SATA drive to put in or the Windows XP since it came pre-installed on the hard drive. I kinda think the hard drive might be dead is there anything else I could try before I go out and buy a new hard drive?