Hard drives can't be accessed, A1XE

I had to take my A1 apart to replace the fan on the CPU cooler. When I put it back together it wouldn't boot. Turns out it was the coin cell battery. Since I leave my computers on 24/7, I hadn't really noticed that the coin cell was dead until I shut it off for this procedure. Replaced that and I was able to boot from the 4.1 CD, but not from the hard drives. Message says it can't find an SLB.

After booting again from CD, I opened media toolbox and the two 1 TB hard (Sil/SATA) drives show up, but it won't let me access them, or format them, saying there are errors on some block(s). After several reboots, the backup drive partitions put up icons on the workbench. But they all say they are bad.

Do I have to bite the bullet and buy new hard drives? Can I pull them out and hook them up to my Windows computer and try to format them in the hopes that that puts them back into a writable state so I can start over with these drives, and re-reformat them in the Amiga? Wow! Years of data and downloads and programs lost because BOTH drives went bad at the same time.

Thanks for any pointers.

Paul

@Paul

Seems unlikely that two drives have failed at the same time.
More likely is you have slightly unseated a sata card or something.

I would unplug the drives and associated cards and plug them back in again.

You might also have damaged a cable.

Cheers

@TiredOfLife

Well, 1 TB drives are cheap so I have tried two of them. Still getting block errors. Tried new SATA cables too.

Could a SiI 3112 card go bad and cause block read/write errors? I've found some new 3112 cards on ebay for sale. But I hate to keep throwing money on things if there's no chance of it making a difference. Would putting it in a different PCI slot make any difference?

This would be a good time for an X5000/40 to become available.

Paul