The drive may have been damaged during the power outage. When you format a hard disk, it writes heavily to the disk, and if your computer is shut down improperly, such as the case in your power outage, the heads, which write to the disk can scratch the platters. Sounds like your drive might have been killed. Only thing i can think of. Although i have had problems with apple's formatting utility before... Hopefully this is not the case, but i think it probably is.