Yesterday we had a power surge, followed by a power outage. This left my WHS borked: powering on just gives to a flashing blue light (the led on the power supply also flashes green) - no fan or boot activity, nothing.

I urgently needed some files off there in the short term (and the 500GB of photos, music, personal video etc in the long term) so I took the hard drive out and put it in my computer.

The files and folders showed up, but I couldn't access them - clicking on an image gave an invalid image error in Picasa, I couldn't play MP3s etc.

I changed the ownership and permissions of the files, still nothing.

I booted in with a LiveCD, the same: files appear, but won't open.

Is there anything else I can do? I'm now wondering if it was just the power cable that's broken, but if so, why can;t I access my files from the hard drive? If it is the power cable, and I replace that and the hard drive, will I have done any harm messing around with ownership and file permissions?