A friend of mine had built my desktop for me a while ago, its an XP MACHINE and it has two disk drives, one was generic (as far as i know) and the other was a sony. the generic one had always been kind of tempermantal and didnt always read a disk, but the sony never  GAVE me any problems.
Somewhat recently, he was showing me something and talking to me and hed unhooked the power to the sony drive and was plugging in back in and misaligned it and itsparked and the computer turned off. It booted up fine but the drive was obviously shot. I bought a new drive and finding ones that were still ide was hard enough lol, and i put it in place of the sony and it didnt open or blink its light.  SO, i SWAPPED the two drives and tried again and it still didnt work. Frustrated, i put everything back- cause atleast the tempermental drive worked part of the time- and now it doesnt open or blink its light either.
The goal of all this mess was to reformat the computer, but since i cant load any of the disks im not really sure what to do and how to fix all of this. help?!Does the rest of your computer seem to work like it is supposed to?is it an ide of a sata drive.  could be the sata or ide controler got a jolt just use the other one. he already said it was an ide system.Another question are there any stst ports on your mobo? Sometimes there might be two of them bottom right side of the mobo.

Sorry for the other remark.well then he shoul try a piggy back cable and MAKE sure its a slave and the other a master. hey its cool Replace the IDE cable.
Hook up only one CD drive.
Use a DIFFERENT Molex power plug for the drive.
If this still does not work borrow a known good PSU of the same or greater wattage and swap it in there.
I would not attempt to salvage either of the optical drives.

And let your friend know that NO PC components should be worked on with the power on or even plugged in...