Accessing dead drive

If a hard drive is dead can it be accessed if you boot from a bootable cd. I have an old laptop not sure which windows is on it. When i boot it says media test failure check cable and OS not found. as far as I know that means the drive is dead. ?

The only bootable cd i had was a norton recovery tool. I tried to boot from that. It said loading windows files then starting windows. Then it said error there is not 454MB needed norton will exit. Is that drive dead if it says loading windows and starting windows?. Or is that just a win pe on the recovery disk

There is only 64MB ram on the laptop. Is that why I got the error.?

Is there any bootable CD I could start windows with?