controller board fried?

[memius]

this may not be the exact right forum, but here goes:

i was poking around inside my kubuntu box, shoving in a new 1T drive, when both the motherboard and the old hard drive started acting up.

now, the hdd won't show up, even in the bios, on any of my machines, and the kubuntu box will only start for about half a second no matter what disk i put in it.

the kubuntu motherboard is not important, but the contents of the hdd is (yes, i know i should have a more recent backup, sorry about that).

i tried the ultimate boot cd, and it found the hdd, but couldn't diagnose or read it. so is there some software that is low level enough to take direct control of a hdd, or do i have to get hold of an identical drive and switch controller boards?

[Rubberman]

What I usually do in a case like this is put the drive in an external USB enclosure, connect it to a running system, and see if it is recognized and auto-mounted. If it does get mounted, I will see if I can access the data on it. If there are problems getting the data, then I unmount it and run fsck on the raw device, which is also what I do if it fails to mount.

Good luck.