Is my hard drive toast?

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1. Press Command and R keys while your Mac is starting and open Disk Utility.

2. Select Macintosh HD in the sidebar and repair the disk. If it doesn't work, try to erase the disk, and if it doesn't work, the hard disk is damaged, so take the Mac to an Apple Store.

If you didn't make a backup before, use DiskWarrior to try to recover your files. Note that it's not sure that it will recover your data, but in most of the cases, it works correctly

If you boot to the recovery partition (boot holding command and r keys down), and use Disk Utility to repair the hard drive, does that complete without error? If it does, can you boot normally now?

You can also try to run the Apple Hardware Test to see if it picks up any obvious hardware issues. It can take an hour+ to run.

If you can't start onto Recovery, the hard disk is damaged and you can't do anything. Take the computer to an Apple Store or try DiskWarrior if you haven't made a backup

How long should I wait for it to boot into recovery? I've tried this and had been waiting 10 minutes with no luck I can hear the drive spinning and clicking

Not a good sign. Did you try running the Apple Hardware Test?

If you have AppleCare, the repair will be free. If not, the hard disk is not the most expensive part. When I took my iMac to an Apple Store to replace my hard disk because of the iMac 1 TB Replacement Program, Apple told me on the receipt that the hard disk costed 99€ (but it was completely free, because it's a replacement program)

Take it in for service. The Apple store or Authorized Service Provider will confirm by system serial number whether you have AppleCare.