The MacBook Pro wont boot and directly goes to the question mark!

My Macbook pro recently stopped booting into Yosemite and directly goes to the folder with a question mark on it. I have tried 3 things,

1. Holding the option key while turning on to select partition to boot in

2. Holding the command+R keys to boot into recovery mode and try to reset OS X

3. Unplugging and re-plugging the hard drive cable

When I opened disk utility in recovery mode the entire partition where my OS X would be is gone and all that is left is a 2GB recovery partition.

My question is whether or not I need to get a new hard drive. Is it dead and is there anyway I can test that? I would like to be able to fix the hard drive and resort to buying a new one as last option. I realize that this problem could also be a faulty hard drive cable and I would have to change that first. Is there any way to know what my problem is specifically?