Windows will not load, hangs at 'loading operating system' during boot

[Abernathie]

My wife's computer crashed yesterday. She got a blue screen and then it rebooted. When it boots it will load the BIOS but then just hangs on a screen that says loading operating system. I tried using the win7 recovery disk, but it was unable to repair the startup issue. I am also unable to select which operating system to repair as it does not list any. I think her hard drive died, when I try to select the hard drive to load the OS from it just tells me the disk needs to be formatted. Are their any other recovery steps I should take? Is there any way to definitively tell whether the hard drive is dead?

It's a custom build running windows 7 ultimate x64
Gigabyte motherboard
Western digital HD 1Tb @7200rpm
AMD phenom II black
Radeon Hd 7950
8gig DDR 3

 

[Pauly]

To specifically test HDD have a look here
Hard Drive Diagnostic Procedure
For general troubleshooting this will help
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/219533-troubleshooting-windows-7-failure-boot.html

 

[Knight1Creeper]

Abernathie, you can try rebooting the computer and repeatedly hitting F8, then select safe mode to boot. If the system boots then it sounds like a driver issue. If it hangs during safe mode boot then it's not a guarantee, but the HDD could have gone bad and the system is unable to process necessary start-up files.