Windows 7: HDD no longer being recognized by my windows installations

My HDD was fine and dandy until I recently had a problem and had to reinstall windows on it. When i went to install windows I noticed that it listed nothing to install to. I checked my bios and the HDD is there so I retried and seen it was still gone from the installation so i grabbed an old XP disk and tried it to no avail and also used ubuntu to see if it would detect it and it actually did but failed to partition the HDD or even install at all. I have tried 2 different windows 7's 3 different XP's, ubuntu, and 98, and a straight up dos. At the same time I tried to fix the MBR and the boot sector and did all them nice pretty DOS commands and the same in terminal.tried drivers to no avail and finally decided to come here and post. I would chalk it up to a dead HDD but my bios sees it just fine

Ubuntu saw it. That gives a ray of hope.

Try running MiniTools Partition Wizard from a bootable CD. If it sees your drive delete all partitions and format it.

Download the bootable CD ISO and burn it to a CD. Free download Magic Partition Manager Software, partition magic alternative, free partition magic, partition magic Windows 7 and server partition software - Partition Wizard Online

I had a drive in a laptop go, and I thought all of my data was gone. My backups to DVD as it turned out could not be read. As a last ditch effort, I stood the laptop up on end, like an open book. Having the axis of the drive reoriented from horizontal to vertical was enough for this drive to boot and allow me to transfer my data to a new drive - a huge relief to say the least.

You could play around with doing this, if you have a laptop or can otherwise change the orientation of the drive.

From what you are saying, it sounds like it could be a bad or loose electrical connection as well, though the drive itself seems like the easiest thing to check by swapping it out.