Grey folder with question mark and Disk Utility can't find HDD.

I have a 2010 MacBook Pro and for some reason the OS X does not boot up. Therefore I see the grey folder flashing. I tried booting into Recovery from holding options button but there are no available startup disks. So I installed Apple recovery on my USB and I boot up with that. I opened disk utility but it does not seem to find the hard disk. I also tried reinstalling Mac OS X and it gives me an error. Is there another bootable software except for Disk Utility that can check the HDD and see if there are any errors or is the HDD just dead?