Drives fried?

[GeneralT]

I had a friend who brought in a computer for me to 'tune-up'. Seems that one of the chips had fried and nothing was working on his machine. I found a burned chip on the mother board and said that it will require a new motherboard. After changing the Motherboard, all his drives would not recognize. I set up the HDD manually on bios and still it would not recognize. I then put his HDD in my computer and and the same occured.. nothing was recognized. Now, I have seen it when HDs go bad but I have never seen all the drives go bad. Is there a chip on the HD and CDrom drive that may have burned out? Is there a way to repair these drives?

 

[SNGX1275]

If there was somethign burned on his motherboard, it is highly probable that something went wrong with his Power Supply and there was a voltage/current spike, one possibility might be a lightning strike. But if there was something serious enough to fry something on the motherboard it isnt' out of question that it was serious enough to also fry other things, which may have included his hard drives.
As far as repairing, well that gets hairy, theoretically the data should still be there and if you could take the platters out and put them in another HD case you could still get the data back, but thats not an option for most people. In other words if you have tried another computer and it didn't work then its safe to be the drives are hosed.

 

[PanicX]

It sounds like he had/has a faulty power supply, be sure to replace it as the same results will occur to the new hardware. As for the drive, It's probably shot, if there's data on it that is more valuable than say, $400 then you can take the drive to a data recovery service and they should be able to recover it for you, however they normally require you provide another hard drive of equal or greater capasity.