P C Advice

[WTMHouston]

I have a mega problem and hope someone can provide some possible clues.

My office server runs Win2000 Server with a P-III 1.0. It serves about 10 workstations (all running Win98). On Thursday, a non-employee was at one of the machines. She downloaded and then installed what I am told was VPN software. I do not know the specifics. During the installation (which she told me (not much credibility) was to the local c drive and not to any of the network drives) two very bad things happened. First, the machine she was at crapped out -- it shut down and would not reboot. I created a boot disk on another machine and was able to get it to boot to an a prompt, but could never get it to a c prompt. The BIOS recognizes that the hard drive exists, but that is as far as it goes. My gut guess is that whatever she was doing destroyed the FAT. But, there is virtually nothing on this machine that is not easily replaceable.

The more important problem is the server. At the same time that the local PC was crapping out, every file on the server (on all of the partitioned drives) disappeared. The file structure remained, but the files were gone. In case this is not clear, all of the directories and subdirectories in all of the partitioned drives still exist, but there are no files in any of the directories or subdirectories.

The server is set up with 3 hard disks (I will call them 1, 2 and 3). The first two are mirrored with a RAID controller. The third was for manual backups. Each disk is partitioned into multiple drives.

After the problem arose, I eventually attempted to reboot the server without making any physical changes to the disk alignment without any success. I was ultimately able to get the server to reboot by removing HD 1 and moving HD 2 into the HD 1 bay (they are all removable hard drives which makes the process much easier).

In the course of attempting to recover all of our data from HD 3, we learned that there had been a glitch in the software used to copy from HD1 to HD3 and that only about 20% of our data from the last two years had been copied to HD3.

Thus, it is now very critical that we try and understand what happened to HD 1 and 2 so that we can hopefully recover at least the majority of our data from it.

Once I moved HD 2 into HD 1 bay and got the network back up, I copied what was on HD 3 onto HD 1 so that we at least had some data -- albeit only about 20%.

Later, I ran an undelete program on HD 2 and found nothing. While this could have been caused (in part) by the overwriting taking place when I copied data from HD 3 to HD 2, I think it is unlikely that nothing on HD 2 would have remained.

I have tried to reinsert HD 1 into bays 2 and 3 and have not been able to get the machine to complete a boot up with HD 1 in the machine.

I am at a loss to understand the cause of what has happened and am out of idea on how to proceed to potentially fix it.

We have lost 80% of our data for the past two years -- business and financial. All help is appreciated in advance.

Troy