Uh-oh... My hard drives are dead? Cry for help

So the other day a storm broke out (I wasn't home, but my machine was on), and apparently the power went out. It's not too strange. The worst I'd experienced was a burned power core (or whatever you call it), I'd just replace it and the machine would come back to life.

But this time it boots ok, but when it detects the hard drive, it says there's an error. I tried using the Knoppix LiveCD, as its helped me before, just to check that my hard drives are still there. They are, , Knoppix can see them, but but can't access them.

So now I'm worried, and I tried installing windows2000 again. It tells me BOTH my C and D drives are damaged or unformatted.

So what do I do now? Anyone know if there'd be a way to repair them, what software would I need? What could have possibly happened? They are 2 separate drives, 1 partition each.

I'm mostly worried about my D drive, since that's where I keep the pictures of my evening at the hotel rooom with Pyr... Ah... I mean, my databases, that's where I keep my bases of data.

Are they on the same IDE channel? That may have been fried in the storm. If you can lay hands on a cheap IDE controller card somewhere, you can test them with that.

I''d try a different PC (set the drive as slave) and see if you can read the data... if so its the Motherboard (or controller card) barring that if its less than three years you can get a replacement drive... but the data is prolly hosed

You could also try setting the secondary drive as master and see if that will load...

Try one drive at a time set as master...

Also try downloading a disk recovery tool..... I think there are some out there that you can try before you buy... If not you might want to head to the local computer store and see if they have software like that cheap (say Walmart might even cary that stuff).

boot of the windows 2000 CD...hit R for recovery console..

Run CHKDSK and force it to repair any errors it finds..

2000 will put the drives offline if there is a significant amount of bad sectors/data.

Very common after a sudden powerloss..

Cant recall the exact switch so type CHKDSK /? first to see the options.

It''s /F as you''d guess. Try them in another computer first, just to be sure it''s your drive and not your machine.

Your bios might have been damaged. Go into it and see if it lets you physically enter the heads and cylinders for the drives. Something may be out of whack with the auto-detect.

If the data is really important, there''s data recovery places around, but they''re very expensive.

Good luck!