How do you tell when your hard drive has died?

Last night, I was watching a movie on my computer (Windows 7) when suddenly Windows bluescreens with an error I have never seen before and sadly wasn’t fast enough to jot down.

Since that time, Windows will not boot. It does one of two things when I try to boot windows… it either stays forever on the start up screen, or simply has a black screen. Spamming F8 allows me to get to the boot menu. I ask it to repair my computer, and it boots that mini-windows, then it tells me it’s repairing my computer and gets stuck on that screen… It still responds, but you can not cancel the operation and it will not do anything. I’ve left it like this for days.

Just now, I put a Linux Mint 17 disk into the computer and booted to Linux, but Mint refuses to mount the Windows partition. This leaves me unable to get my files off that partition so I can reinstall Windows.

Is this a sign that the hard drive has died? Or could there be another explanation? Thanks.