Having the bios able to see the disk, but a live boot can't, makes no real sense to me. If a partition was messed up I'd get that, but to not even see there is a disk to partition, doesn't feel right. I know it's probably a dumb question, but you didn't happen to be messing around in BIOS settings or something right? Is it possible you changed some settings a while ago but haven't rebooted in a while, and this issue was waiting for you this whole time?
If you don't have any other slots on the mother board to try the disk in, you could buy an external adapter for whatever kind of disk you have, which would allow you to use this thing as a USB drive. That should at least allow the live boots to see it.
Also also, is it possible you have two disks, and grub is on one and your data is on the other? Again, kinda weird question, but it's a kinda weird situation...