hard drives quit working?

Ok I have looked thru this forum and found some similar problems but not exactly alike. So before I try the freezer (sounds weird), I figure I'll ask.
I have two computers, a digital starion 932 with windows 95 and a Compaq Presario 4400 with XP. Recently both computers stopped working and to me it seems to be the hard drives. About a month ago we had a lightning storm and the Presario was plugged right to the wall outlet when the power went out but the computer was not on. On the Starion I have a surge protector which I usually keep off and was off the day of the power outage. Now on the Starion with Win95, I get the message "failure fixed disc 0" which I think means the hard drive, then I press F1 to resume as prompted and it returns "operating system not found" Also the computer itself beeps in long bursts. I haven't tried the Presario in a couple of days so I cannot remember what the messages are but I don't know if I should post two separate threads here to make this less confusing. I am mainly concerned with the starion at this time as I have nothing backed up and I need to get it back on. Please help. I have never opened this computer but I had a second hard drive installed around 98 for more data.

 

it's always hard to determine the extent of electrical damage in computers because trouble-shooting that kind of damage often leads to cascading discovery of failures. If your system is beeping like that, and then not being to find the disk it could be your motherboard is toast or your drive is toast or both.

I would take them into a local pc tech shop and see if they can get the data off the drives. If they can then your drives are ok and your mother boards are shot.

 

If you have access to a working computer...you can put the hardrive in as a slave, and when it boots up...go into "My Computer" and see if the drive is there...if so...you can retrieve the important information ...then if you accomplish that...put the drive back into the broken system and see if it will let you format the drive and install a new copy of windows...if it lets you do that...odds are it was the master boot record that got corrupted...and atleast you won't have to buy another drive!!

But like Kodo said...it is hard to diagnose power surge problems...just by explanation of the problem!! Being that it says "failure fixed disc 0"...I would agree with Kodo again with his statement of it probably being either a fried motherboard or hardrive!!

Roger