Disaster Recovery 2

Today I booted my Win98se machine and got the dos prompt. I powered
down and hooked it up as a slave and there was NOTHING on my C drive
except AUTOEXEC.DOS (1k) COMMAND.COM (92k), FRUN (0k), BOOTLOG.TXT (0k)
and SUHDLOG.DAT (9k). I'd been running this system for a few years
with around 100 or so software programs installed at any one time and
had no significant problems. I've got 3 other partitions on this
physical disk that are intact (my DATA.. thank goodness!) How could
an entire drive disappear like that?




This might be significant:

Some time ago I noticed a bunch of FILE0001.CHK, 2, 3, etc in the root
dir of the C drive partition. I suppose they were left from a previous
scandisk but I hadn't seen scandisk run on boot in quite some time and
I hadn't run it manually either so everything seemed fine and I just
ignored it.

Also, the last time I started the computer I deleted into the bios
setup screen and let it sit there for an hour or so.. Why you ask?
Because this powers the firewire to charge my Ipod and I didn't need to
boot into windows. The night before it booted fine.. just like it
always had for years. So, I'm thinking this was a virus or I should
have started backing up when I saw the .chk files.



My System specs:

Windows 98se
Regular manual MS Windows updates
Regular manual AVG virus scans
Regular manual AdAware spyware scans
Motorola Hardware Router
Cable Modem
Maxtor ATA133 controller card
200GB Maxtor Hard Disk
1 FAT32 primary active boot partition
27GB C:\ drive with windows and programs installed on it
1 extended partition
3 50GB FAT32 data drives D:\, E:\ and F:\



BTW: This is distater recovery 2 because I just recently went through
this with a 250GB "temp" drive that got corrupted when I took it off of
its controller and stuck it in a external enclosure and then tried to
read and write to it.. well it got corrupted and I ended up loosing
all my data. I decided it must have been the controller chip in the
external case was not compatible with the controller I formatted the
drive on originally.