Dead HD?

[Slartibartfast]

Hey guys, I've got an old dual celly box, and I think the HD might be going. It's not terribly old - 40gig Quantum Fireball. Anyways, I'm trying to reformat it, and I'm having issues. I can boot into Linux fine (the currently installed OS), but when I try to boot off of a Win 98 or XP CD, it just gets a black screen with the HD light lit up. I can boot into Knoppix, but when I go to use fdisk on the drive, it tells me the drive is not accessible. At this point I'm thinking it's a dead drive - I've tried it on a few different IDE controllers (this mobo has 4) to no avail. Any ideas?

edit: I have no cd-burner, so the ultimate boot cd is out for now.