Hard drive not being recognized in BIOS

[Wolfgang <wolfgangmob@gmail.com>]

I was away in Rolla for the last three weeks and got home last night, well after restarting my hard drive ceased to be recognized, now the only thing I really did was install updates on my windows partitions and I experienced no problems while using the computer prior to restart.  The hard drive will always spin up, however my HDD activity LED may or may not turn on and the hard drive is continually unseen in BIOS, even after using every SATA port.  I could afford to purchase a new drive, and I could manage without do a recovery, however I'm still unsure as to weather there is another component in my system failing, also I have no other computer to test my hard drive on, which I fear may be part of the issue as my optical drive is having issues trying to boot from a live CD occasionally.