We have to leave our computers on continuously where I work. We have this deal, not for sure what you call it, but the computers are plugged into it in case a disaster strikes. Anyway we had a terrible electrical storm, & when lightening struck, power in the building/computers everything went off for at least 30 minutes. When power was restored all computers came on & functioned normal except two that are giving us disk boot failures no matter what we do. Since we are not technicians we are wondering if anything can be done about this or are the machines toasted. Will not boot from a boot disk & cannot access hard drive.

Are those two also plugged into the surge protectors/UPS' that I am assuming you were describing above? They may very well be fried, however you should check the BIOS settings and make sure those are ok. (They may be set up to access the hard drive first, and upon failing to do that they just hang. Or, the floppy disks you are attempting to boot from may not be bootable.) So two things to try. First enter the BIOS and look specifically for a boot order of devices. A:, C:, CD-ROM/SCSI or something comparable would be best. After that's been validated/changed, download a boot disk from www.bootdisk.com (any boot disk will do), extract (not copy) that to a floppy disk (instructions should be on the download site), then insert that disk into one of these two machines and try to boot. To enter the BIOS, it will generally tell you to hit DEL or F1 or something at some point during boot. If it does, do it. If not, right after you turn the machine on, start hitting DEL, all of the F keys (F1-F12), maybe even Alt+S until you finally make it into the BIOS. If you do make any changes in there, look around for an option to save and exit. It'll probably be invoked with one of the F keys or Esc. Make sure you do save your changes, or as is logical, they won't be applied to any successive boots of the machine.

Thanks for the response. I am going to try it now. They are both plugged into the surge protectors.

Just a quick note about "surge Protectors": The cheap "surge protectors" you can pick up at Wal-Mart for under $10.00 provide virtually no protection for your PC. The breaker switch in them is not sensitive enough, if it works at all. Sadly, this is not usually discovered until after a thunderstorm has fried your computer. An APC Professional Surge Arrest can be picked up for under $30.00 U.S. Worth every penny.

I give up! I have tried everything to no avail. We are having some techs to come in Monday morning to look at them. I dont know about the price of the surge protectors though. But knowing the company I work for, they always try to find the cheap way out.

Ok, cool. Thanks for the update, Donaldson - and sorry we couldn't walk you through it. :)