Bad Hard Drive?

I'm having issues with a laptop, Toshiba Satellite A215S4697 running Windows Vista. The hard drive makes a continuous clicking sound upon booting and displays a black screen with an error:

"For Realtek RTL8100E/8101E Fast Ethernet Network Adapter v.1.02 (060529)
PXE-E61 Media Test Failure, Check Cable
PXE-M0F Exiting PXE ROM"

I am aware now that it is showing this because it is attempting to boot from LAN, but what my problem is that when I went into the system BIOS and disabled the option to boot from LAN, I noticed the hard drive wasn't being recognized as a boot device. Is this a sure sign of a bad hard drive or could it be some other issue? How can I fix this? Also if the hard drive is the issue, is there a way to recover some data from it via a software such as norton ghost or other hard drive recovery softwares? Thanks in advance

If the hard drive is clicking and not recognized in the BIOS replace it.
Chances are really good that you will not be able to recover anything that is on it at this point as the system is not even recognizing the drive.

Take the drive out and see if the connectors are IDE or SATA. If it is SATA you may be able to connect it to a tower system and possibly recover something off of it if the system BIOS sees the drive.
Its certainly worth trying.

Replace your CMOS/RTC battery, if you can find it...then reset date/time and boot options.

The PXE boot thing is normally the default setting on a system made by an OEM...and it comes up sometimes when the CMOS battery is dying/weakening.

Louis