PC started malfunctioning after OS reinstall, now my boot drive (SSD) is not being detected at all

Alright so this starts a few weeks ago when I was trying out shadowplay in nvidia geforce experience. I was recording some gameplay, so i could check it out afterwards. I forgot to turn off shadowplay when I was done gaming, and I just shut down my pc. The next time i turned on my pc i was unable to launch geforce experience or even the nvidia control panel. None of my games would launch either. Keep in mind that this was the first time ever i tried out shadowplay. Coincidence that all my software related to nvidia or games refused to launch after i forgot to turn off shadowplay? I didn't think so. So I searched around the web trying to find a solution. Nearly all websites i visited adviced the OP to uninstall all nvidia drivers and perform a clean install. So I tried to do so. But i just kept running into new problems and ended up with blue screen multiple times. It seemed like an endless downward spiral. I ended up only being able to boot up my pc in safe mode, otherwise I would receive a blue screen no matter what i tried. So i figured it was a problem with my boot drive, and since i don't keep important files on this drive, I just went ahead and formatted my boot drive and proceeded to install a fresh copy of windows 8. That went well and my computer was now up and running again. The thing was though, that all my programs and games were installed on my secondary drive and since i had just formattet my main drive and reinstalled windows, all programs and games on my secondary drive were practically unusable, since i was missing some dll files. Or at least i thought so. I uninstalled all i could from the drive, but some games were not uninstallable. I was only able to delete the files related to the game, but i kept the files, just in case i could reinstall the games using these files. And I was right - I was able to reinstall the games (these are Battlefield Bad Company 2 and BF3). I then launched BFBC2 and played for about an hour. When I closed the game an error popped up on the screen, saying some dll file was missing. I didn't think much about it and just closed the error message. After that I got a windows notification in bottom right hand corner saying I needed to restart my pc in order to fix some issue. So I went ahead and did that and a few seconds later I was at the login screen, which was blinking about once a second and the background was all black. I could see my account and move the mouse around, but every time the screen blinked, the cursor position was reset and I was unable click on my account and login. So I shut down my pc by holding the power button down and tried turning it on again, but now my boot drive was not being detected. I also noticed that it took a significantly longer amount of time to get past the ASRock boot screen, which normally only takes 2-3 seconds. I have tried a couple things now to fix this:

- Booting from a USB drive with the windows installer on and checking if the drive is being detected under 'custom installation'. It is not.
- Booting into the 'repair computer' option from the USB drive and then running chkdsk C: /r /f /x. That did not change anything.
- Booting into the BIOS to see if my primary drive is being detected there. It is not.
- Installing windows on my secondary drive to see if my primary drive is detected in windows explorer. It is not.
- Connecting my primary drive to two other computers, one running windows xp and the other vista, using two different cables. It was not detected in either of the cases - both in bios and explorer. Also here I noticed that it took a significantly longer time to get past the bios boot screen.

This is seriously getting on my nerves. Am I dealing with a dead ssd here? If so, what the **** killed it?
Also, I have experienced almost nothing but problems with geforce experience. I am never installing that on any of my machines again. What a useless piece of software anyways.

Specs:
i7-3770k
GTX 680
ASRock Z77 Extreme4
OCZ Vector 128GB
Western Digital 1TB