Ultimate Boot CD

Hi all, my house got hit by lightning and it fried my computer, I was wondering if my hard drive survived the bolt. I got another computer and tried to use my hard drive and i cant get anywhere, it boots but then after the post, it gives me a blue screen saying that windows was shutdown incorrectly, for me to try to clean any virus, and do a chkdsk /f to it. I dont know what do i need to do.

A bit more info would help..

To start are you putting the hard drive into a system with another drive? If so, set the jumper on the drive in question to slave and see if the system will boot. If you can get into windows or other OS you can test the drive then.

If your putting the drive into a system with no other drives, set the jumper for master and then set the boot order in BIOS to boot to the CD and boot up UBCD, UBCD4Win or your OS CD and see if you can get somewhere with that.

Is the drive detected in BIOS at all? Is it showing the correct size?

I've checked out systems for several friends that have been hit with lightning and 1 was totally shot, 1 only a modem was shot (replaced modem and system was fine) 1 most was shot but hard drive still works and others had various usable parts. All components from a system that has been hit will always be in question as far as I'm concerned. A quick way to test the system is to remove all components and see if you can get Beeps, then add ram, video, drives ( 1 at a time), other components and see if you get anywhere.