windows folder missing

Have a machine I am working on that when booting to dos and looking at the file system I find that all the folders within Windows are all gone. Only folder left is the temp folder. Diagnostics indicate no hardware problem, user had Norton antivirus and was using Sygate Personal Firewall.

Any idea what causes just the windows folders to disappear. NDD indicates naturally all kinds of problems when doing its thing on the windows folder but no clue as to why the folders are gone.

Any thoughts ???

 

Aliens from the 9th dimension?

It's just possible that someone didn't follow the recommendation during 98 setup and named their system directory something else. I can't imagine why someone would do that unless they had no idea of the problems that could result, but there is that option. In fact, the system folder doesn't even need to be on the drive to which 'Windows" is supposedly being installed.

 

Abraxas

Nope to your statement. I rebuilt this machine 6 months ago from scratch using the HP restore cd which holds windows 98 2nd edition. I also set them up with the firewall and norton. Client uses Cable Modem. Only thing the client can tell me is that when they got back from vacation the firewall informed them that their ports were being scanned and then the next time she rebooted her machine it came up with missing or corrupt .vxd's. Well naturally when the windows folder is empty its not going to find any vxd's to work with. I've seen this happen on 2 HP machines in the past year and I still cant figure out how the windows folder and all the sub folders could be gone. The file structure in what was left in the windows folder were gibberish.

Again any ideas ???

 

Boot HDD defective/dead ? If you cannot see it completely in DOS,
(I assume you mean booting from a floppy) then it seems to be a
HW problem. Did you try a scandisk after a boot from a floppy ?
A scanreg /fix ?
regards

 

Merlin

I would think the h.d. to but the diags I have run including pc certify pro, norton disk doctor all come back saying nothing wrong with drive. Unfortunately, running scanreg /fix aint going to do much cuz theres nothing left of the windows folder to fix. No sub-folders no .dat files nothing and if h.d. bad why would it just wipe out the windows folders ???


Boot HDD defective/dead ? If you cannot see it completely in DOS,
(I assume you mean booting from a floppy) then it seems to be a
HW problem. Did you try a scandisk after a boot from a floppy ?
A scanreg /fix ?
regards

 

With the scan disk from a boot floppy, I was thinking that the folders are
maybe still there, but a corrupted FAT is preventing you seeing them.
regards

 

Merlin

Nope norton disk doctor in my opinion is better than scandisk and norton did find errors and all were unrecoverable. All the other folders outside of windows directory were truncated to the old 6.2 format. Something hit the file system and I cant figure out what could cause such damage other than a nasty virus or worm or a hacker somehow got past the firewall. Even the h.d.'s vendors diags say the drive is okay. Hard sometimes to try and explain to the client what could have happened when nothing indicates any hardware problems.

Thanks for you input guess I will just rebuild the system and hopefully it will last this time. Will however recommend a new h.d. just in case.