Hmmm, in my experience it is very unusual for a hard drive to not even show up like that. If the drive does not get registered at boot up, I am pretty sure you won't be able to run an fsck on it. You are in IT right? This is equivelant to fdisk not even seeing the drive (as opposed to reporting a physical size of 0Megs as caused by many media failures).

A few things to try are verifying all your connections, reseating cables, and just rebooting a bunch of times to see if it ever finds the drive. As a last resort you may even want to try dropping the drive (without empeg attached) a few inches (yes I have seen that work temporarily). Also, as someone mentioned, try putting the drive in another machine (you would need a machine that could read an ext2 filesystem, got linux?).

If you can get it to the point where the drive is showing up again, you should be able boot from the good drive and try to fsck the partitions on the bad drive (will probably make things worse if you have a hardware problem) or use dd to try and copy the whole drive to a file on the good drive (and then back to a new drive later).

-Mike