Harddrive

okay, i was away from my comp and when i come back my comp rebooted by itself but now it does not detect any of my hard drives! (master is not detected, slave comes up with garbage)

they were working fine before i left, they never made any funny noises (grinding, clicking, etc) the whole time i've had them.

does anyone know what happened to my drives?

could it be the ide cables are faulty?

any hope of getting the data off the drives?

OP here, okay i got the drive to be recognized by going in the bios setup and pressing enter on how the primary ide was going to be detected, but i had to do it several times before it actually recognized the drive.  This is with the jumper set to master and it being the only device on the cable.

then i quit the bios setup and at the boot screen it is also recognized after a long delay, but then it still says "primary hard disk failed".

so is my drive dead?

any way to get the data off of it?