Hello Dale,  It may be that other components in the "shocked" system have 
been damaged and this is the cause of the hard-drive not being recognized 
properly.  How did the surge enter the computer?   ...the phone line? 
power-cord?   My experience with computers touched by lightning is that they 
can be damaged in subtle ways that cause erratic events and can be difficult 
to diagnose.  Do you have another drive you can install in the computer as 
the boot drive and then slave the old drive?  If there is a problem 
installing the OS to this alternate drive also then maybe your motherboard 
components have been damaged.  You could also mount the data drive into a 
different system as a slave and try to retrieve the data that way.  Just 
some thoughts.  Thank you. AG

> A friend at church brought her PC to me (eMachine) and said that they 
> experienced a close lightning strike and that afterwards the PC would not 
> boot. It appears that the HD has been scrambled in some way (I get a read 
> error message upon boot). The HD seems physically undamaged as I ran 
> Spinrite on it and encountered no problems. The BIOS recognizes the drive 
> OK and it is partitioned (NTFS), but Windows XP installer says it is 
> unformatted and wants to format it to install XP. I'd like to recover some 
> data (pictures, etc.) on the HD for her as well as get Windows working 
> again. Can somebody suggest how I might be able to recover the files so I 
> can then do a clean XP install? Thanks for any help in advance.
>
> Regards,
> Dale Mentzer 

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