Certainly anything connected to the system busses can interact with almost anything else. I have had the experience more than once of hard drives being undetected due to faulty graphics cards.
There are a few places that claim to be able to rejuvenate damaged drives and even to repair bad clusters. The HDD Regenerator claims that by using some high-speed alternating magnetic fields that it is able to repair drives. I've actually tried this one but was never able to get the program to operate well enough to actually use it on a drive. It looks like mumbo-jumbo to me, but desperation makes a lot of things look more reasonable and if it gave you 20 more minutes of disk access to retrieve data, that would be something.
http://www.pcnet-online.com/downloads/hddregerator.htm
The other one that I've used is Spinrite6. At least it comes from someone who, though possibly prone to bouts of paranoia, at least has his feet planted in reality. How this one works is also a deep mystery. I've only used it once for maintenance purposes, running the full 20-hour scan of a drive. The drive seemed much faster afterward, but I didn't use a stopwatch or anything. The testimonials are interesting.
The only reason I don't actually use this one more often is that 20 hours of work will no doubt shorten the life of the drive. So, it's set aside for recovery operations.
http://grc.com/spinrite.htm
But, these are dependent on the drive being recognized by BIOS. If it isn't, something has gone wrong with the onboard electronics and something serious. It is possible for something on the PCI bus to actually burn out components of the EIDE and that looks like what has happened to you. Perhaps not even the manufacturer can predict or reproduce the problem, so that leaves you looking like a nut-case that they simply ignore. But stranger things have happened.
Time to listen to
MysticEyes sage advice, though I know I would try to rejuvenate them, too, if for nothing more than the challenge.