The symptoms of a dead hard drive are the data being inaccessible, frequent system crashes, BSOD's or Blue Screen of Death, clicking or grinding noises or the hard drive that is dead or failing may not be detected by the computer BIOS or operating system.
Other signs and symptoms of a dead or failing hard drive are data corruption, slow performance, error messages when accessing of files and even the hard drive not spinning.
If the hard drive is not spinning up then the hard drive could be dead.
Most often a hard drive will start to warn you of it when the hard drive is failing or about to die.
When the hard drive is failing or is about to die there will often be clicking, whirring, screeching or grinding sounds that come from the hard drive.
A significant slow down in your computers speed, especially during booting up, file access and application loading are often a sign of a failing hard drive.
Having scrambled file names, error messages when opening of files and missing files are also signs that the hard drive's storage is failing.
And even intermittent or frequent freezes and crashes of your computer, especially when interacting with files can also signal that the hard drive is failing or is about to die.
A hard drive should last between 5 to 10 years before they go bad.