Question : how to prove power surge damage

I have a server and several workstations.

Last week, everything starting going slow and not working properly.
Settings were effected, systems shutting down, etc.

On the server, there showed in the event log that it shut off at 5:20am and restarted.
That morning is when things started messing up. There was also an lightening storm
that night and morning. The Server was on a battery backup ups that when I unplugged
it from the wall, it made a pop sound [ server was not plugged in ] and then seemed to start
its backup power - it is over 4 years old.

The hard drives were functioning, but with errors and slowly.
When I did a ChkDsk on the weekend, they showed bad sectors non repairable and
then shutdown. I was able to recover the info from doing a copy of the drives and
backup the night before [ luckily ]. I had an old cloned drive that I replaced the old drives with
and restored the data to current.

Also during last week some workstations started acting the same way.
5 out of 15 did this. I did not want to run anything during the week, so on this
weekend I did. I ran chkdsk and 5 came back the same way with bad sectors.
1 this morning stopped completely and will not boot at all.

I also scanned the systems prior to running the chkdsk and they had no infections.

So, with all that info, how would I prove that this is a power surge?

That is the only explaination that I have for the so many systems to be effected and what has
happened since these systems are all new - less than a year old - and it only happened to a handful not all of them.

thanks for helping me play detective.

Answer : how to prove power surge damage

If the power company says they saw no surges but a lot of people are claiming then it's more likely your disk format was damaged by the magnetic field created by the lightning bolt. Has your kit got plastic or metal cases?