Can I save any data at all before i go thru formatting a drive?

You should not be thinking about formatting a drive. The drive is either working or it isn't. Formatting a drive that doesn't work isn't going to result in anything positive.

Have you determined from looking at the serial output whether or not there are two drives being recognized at bootup? What does the relevant section of the bootup text look like ("probing primary interface")? Have you tried to navigate to /drive0 and /drive1 from the shell prompt?