I was working on my PC yesterday and all of a sudden there is a power failure at my area. After the power resume, I restart my PC and it was not able to detect both my Primary and Secondary HDD. I try both HDD on a different PC and it can't detect it as well. Pls help, I've some very important document that need to retrive. I didn't have a backup copy!

If you've tried the harddrive in a different PC and it isn't detected then it's toast. about the only chance of recovering the data will be by replacing the circuitboard on the drive with an identical board. No guarantees here but it's either that or pay a data recovery service. I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

How large are the drives and what is the motherboard model # of the second PC? If it's an older one it's possible the drives are good but are too large for the bios to see. You need to go into cmos/bios setup on the first computer and make sure both IDE controllers are enabled and that the drives are properly identified--usually as AUTO. Does it recognize your other IDE devices? It's hard to believe the power flucuation would kill the HDs but not affect the motherboard. Maybe the on-board IDE controllers are shot. In that case you could probably add an ATA card for the drives.

Thanks for the reply, the primary is 40GB whereas the secondary is 120GB both are Western Digital HDD. The 2nd board that I try on is a newer model but different platform coz I'm using AMD whereas the 2nd board that I try on is Intel board. The BIOS just don't see both of the HDD although I can feel there is heat coming out fr d HDD n its spinning as well. The original board do recognise my ODD, so the chances of IDE controller failure might not be high. I'm trying 2 get a new HDD 2 test on the initial board but haven't get the chance to shop.

Well, the drives may be bad then. You might try different cables but I'd think they'd be OK. I'm not sure how your drives are cabled but you might try moving them from primary to secondary (or vice versa) or test them separately if they're on the same cable. For WD drives a single drive is usually no jumper whereas a drive as master is jumpered as master.

When I test with the 2nd board I,m actually using a different cable which is in working order. Bad cable is rule out and I've tested moving them from Primary to Secondary and vice versa as well both result is negative. The drive might be bad then. I'm not sure what make it not detectable by the BIOS but I think the drive is still fine coz as I mention before there is still heat coming out from the drive and I can feel it spinning too. Sending it to data recovery centre might be the only way to retrieve back my data. I'm not sure how much it'll cost but I'm sure it'll not come cheap. Thanks for the advise.