Is my hard drive dead?

[Robert Fitzpatrick]

Woke up this morning to a running Fiesty machine as every morning, but 
my desktop would not fully load when logging in. I rebooted after a 
couple of tries and now find problems with the HD. I am now booted up in 
KNOPPIX and trying to determine if my HD is toast and I need to copy to 
another drive. In KNOPPIX, my old fstab shows me that /media/hda4 is my 
root partition and /media/hda5 is my /home, all other partitions are not 
critical to boot, just backed up data and a previous OS on a couple of 
other partitions that I cannot open. However, good thing, I can view and 
edit and get clean fsck's on these two critical partitions. So, I 
commented out all except those two, swap and devices in the 
/media/hda4/fstab, however, I still get I/O errors when booting Ubuntu. 
I even tried booting the prevoius OS on my Ubuntu grub menu initially, 
but that partition is not even accessible via KNOPPIX, so I'm sure 
something wrong there. Is there anything else to try or should I start 
copying my accessible root and home partitions to a new drive? And if 
the latter, do I just copy them to the new drive with swap and adjust 
the fstab file?

Thanks in advance. Robert