Mac Pro 2008 Not Recognizing SATA Hard Drives After Power Failure...

So we recently had a weird power "outage" where the power still seemed to be surging some (my monitor was blinking wouldn't turn completely off until I yanked the plug on it), and to my dismay, when the power came back on, I started having boot issues with my Mac. Luckily I had a couple of identical dual-quad core machines sitting around (workgroup environment), swapped my hard drive into one of them, and was back in business on-the-fly.
However, I'm now trying to troubleshoot the faulty machine (qihout throwing parts at it yet) and am stuck at an impasse. With the hard drive of the secondary machine cross-installed into the one that got "hit" by the outage, I simply got the chime and then it stuck on the dreaded gray screen, and out of all the boot options, the only one that would get me a different result was to try to option-boot into the Startup Manager, which would still give me the gray screen but also a mouse cursor after about a minute. Zapped PRAM... reset SMU... even swapped CMOS battery... all to no avail.
So I started yanking things. Memory.. video card... and finally the one and only (swapped) hard drive. The last one did it, and I was finally able to option-boot, start up from the Installation CD, and ultimately, D-boot into the hardware tests on the CD. Ran both normal and extended tests and everything checked out fine, with no errors (and based on the potetnial error messgaes I read about, these tests check everything from the logic board to the power supply, and voltage across both).
Now I'm torn and not sure which route to go from here. Machine seems to operate relatively normally when booting from CD... all hardware tests pass... Super Drive works (not sure it that's SATA or PATA, but guessing the latter at this point)... it just won't take a hard drive (which I verified is fine in another computer), regardless of which of the 4 bays I put it in. I'm also hard presed to believe that the power outage/surges caused the SATA cable(s) to go bad yet nothing else, which still have me leaning towards SATA controller on the board or a power supply issue despite the fact the tests passed.
Thoughts, opinions, or comments... from experience or otherwise? Thanks in advance!

Look hatter. I'm not saying it doesn't, but "prevention" is not why I started the thread. It was to troubleshoot the already existing problem, and you suggesting I run out and drop a combined $1000 on UPS units for each of the five 2008 Mac Pros I still have in my department is neither contributory to the thread topic nor cost-effective just to (possibly) prevent another (what seems to now be) $10 cable issue yet another 6 years down the road. Thanks, though. :/
Well it wasn't the power supply, nor apparently the SATA controller (I don't believe at this point). I finally got the hard drive to recognize and boot again, but ended up having to use one of the two extra SATA connector ports on the board (which I can only assume are handled by the onboard SATA controller as well) and a 4-pin molex to SATA power adapter connected to the power output for the secondary optical drive. As such, It very well may just be the "Hard Drive Harness Cable", although I need to order a male to female SATA extension cable so I can hook the drive up directly to the data side of that the drive bay connectors to determine whether it's the data side or the power side causing issues. I'm again assuming power, since the extra SATA ports seem to work, I'm pretty sure the drive isn't spinning up fully, yet the bays obviously 'recognize' there's a drive in there (thus the gray screen when one is plugged in).
Anyway - I'll update when I get to that point, primarily for posterity's sake, as I found several "unresolved" gray screen threads on the web (and even in these forums) that sounded just like mine yet offered little ultimate help. In the meantime, does anyone want to speculate on whether it's the cable itself or maybe the SATA chain power plug on the board could be bad? It looks to be pretty close to the main power input connector on the board, so just wondering if (worst case scenario) something could have popped on the board between the two? Seems unlikely, but...
Either way, I can always work around it all if necessary by utilizing the same setup I got it to boot with.

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I have been experiencing random intermittent hard crashes of my "early 2008" model 8-core Mac Pro. Now I have finally found an easy reproducible test case (see below), and hope others will try it and post the results. This is a video-driver related crash that I have now duplicated with two different video cards.
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This is not a bug specific to Folding@Home; juding from the log messages and the effect, this is exactly the same crash that is intermittently triggered by the default Mac OS X screensavers (I use Arabesque, but I think any OpenGL screen saver does it). It's just that running Folding@Home is an easier way to trigger the bug than leaving your screensaver running for hours.
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a
1.) I considered that I had a bad video card, so I got another GeForce 8800 GT and installed that. Still crashed.
2.) I disconnected my second monitor, and tried it with only one monitor. Still crashed.
3.) I booted from the pristine boot disk my Mac shipped with (10.5.1). Still crashed.
4.) I reduced the resolution on my 30" Cinema display to 800x600. Still crashed.
5.) Just to stave off the usual chorus of "try zapping your PRAM" posts, I zapped the PRAM. Of course, this did nothing (I don't think this has really fixed a problem since the 1990s...). Anyway, it still crashed.
6.) In doing all these tests, I disconnected all USB/FireWire peripherals.
7.) My Mac is totally up-to-date with Software Update as of Thu, Mar 27, 2008. Mac OS X 10.5.2.
I don't want to return this Mac to Apple; it is wicked fast and that really helps me with my work. But, the frequent crashing really is a productivity-killer.
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(Note: there are lots of similar problems with other Macs and the new Mac OS X 10.5... I hope to specifically address this particular model and crash in this thread.)
If not, I will go to the next extreme step: pulling out some of my RAM. I have 12GB of RAM, and it all seems to work fine, no parity errors or anything. But I know sometimes problems don't happen unless there's "too much" RAM, "too high" resolution, and so on. But I would like to hear from others before I go banging on my precious DIMMs and riser cards.
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The next step will be to determine if this is just another unfortunate defect that affects ALL 2088 Mac Pros (in which case I would want to keep my fast Mac and wait for fixed drivers), or if perhaps just a subset of them have defective video cards that cause the driver to crash in this way (in which case I would want a replacement).
---------- NOTES: ----------
[1]: I can connect via SSH on the command line to the Mac. However, the GUI environment seems borked; opening apps or trying to gracefully quit them via AppleScript either does not work or really hard freezes everything, such that SSH no longer works either.
[2]: A similar (but perhaps different) issue affecting notebooks is discussed here, and there are some people with Mac Pros, too: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6786960
[3]: The Folding @ Home client, which can be used to trigger this bug, can be gotten here: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download
[4]: The severe defect affecting many (most?) 2008 Mac Pro machines' ability to sleep without losing data is discussed in this other thread: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1353551

Hello guys, thank you for the replies.
I do have more data at this point.
ujeezy: Those posts on MacNN and others like them did give some clues.
Jon BWFC: I think you are (partly) right that it's (partly) an issue with the driver. But I have confirmed with a fair degree of certainty in my case that it is a hardware issue too, likely with the video card and not the Mac Pro itself.
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I had another GeForce 8800 card, so I went through some exhaustive troubleshooting. I tested each card, installed in each of the 16x slots, booting from either my normal 10.5.2 boot disk or a clone of the pristine virgin system disk that shipped with the Mac, and tried to see if the Mac would crash.
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So the upshot is, all those times I was using Folding@home to test this issue were bogus, because Folding@home crashes any Mac Pro with the NVIDIA card, and crashes MacBook Pro machines with NVIDIA chips as well.
Argh! So I had to retest. It took a couple of days but I found another reliable way to crash my Mac Pro, more quickly than just leaving the screensaver on for a day or two: run this OpenGL virtual fish tank simulator[4] for 2-3 minutes. Unlike the Folding@home test, this did not crash any of my other Macs, and after exhaustive testing I found that it ONLY crashed the Mac Pro with one of the GeForce 880 cards installed, and not the other one. This was regardless of what slot it was installed in or what boot disk was used.
Whew! So, I concluded that indeed, there is a hardware defect in one of my GeForce 8800 cards which causes the machine to lock up. [2]
What made this problem much harder to deal with was the fact that Mac OS X (specifically the graphics driver parts of the OS, perhaps NVIDIA-specific) crashes with these same symptoms in other cases too. Like when you run Folding@home, or in some of these cases people are talking about with their MacBook Pro machines.
So, when there is a bona-fide hardware defect, it is really hard to isolate. (It took me like four days.)
The thing is, the defective NVIDIA card that crashes the Mac[2] was a REPLACEMENT card for the 8800 card that shipped with my Mac. I called Apple about the video artifacts I was seeing and they replaced the card.
I am now running the original card (and suffering the ugly video artifacts, but no crashes). At my own expense, I ordered an ATI card (the RADEON HD 2600 XT) and I will install that.
I hope someday to have my Mac work without graphics glitches or crashes. For now, operating (mostly) without crashes will have to do.
The original problem with this Mac continues, though: the video doesn't work correctly; it starts displaying visual artifacts after 1-72 hours of use[1]. That could either be because:
a.) a hardware defect in that video card
b.) a software problem with the driver/OS
c.) a hardware defect in the Mac itself
I strongly suspect A, but hopefully my buying a different card and testing with that will help further isolate what is wrong.
I am marking this thread "solved" because the specific issue I originally posted about has been resolved: the GeForce 8800 card causing the crashes is defective, and using another card fixes that issue.
[1]: The original GeForce 8800 card that shipped with my Mac Pro exhibited annoying-but-not-deadly video artifacts, which can be seen here: http://masonmark.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/bogusvideoartifacts.jpg
[2]: Apple replaced the video card, and that is when my deadly video-corruption-plus-frozen-Mac crash problem began. A screenshot example of that problem can be seen here: http://masonmark.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/crashedmac_pro_akashitball.jpg
[3]: The red herring in this case was the Mac OS X bug (seemingly specific to NVIDIA-equipped Macs including Mac Pro and MacBook Pro) that causes a very similar full system crash. This bug can easily be triggered by running the Folding@home version "6.10beta2" demo application. That is a serious bug, and since my employer is a Mac software company I reported this bug to Apple via the official channel. It is Apple bug number 5830772.
[4]: The OpenGL fish tank simulator I found, which would trigger the system crash caused by my defective 8800 video card (but would not crash any other Mac, or crash my Mac Pro with the other 8800 video card installed) can be found at: http://uri.cat/software/Fish/

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