Here's a lesson in system redundancy. When the power goes out, and you only have UPS' to give you graceful shutdown, you may not be fully protected from dirty power after the initial hurricane recovery. It turns out that after a couple of days in the dark, the power came back on, but continued to flash off and on for brief moments as the grid was re-energized. Our primary APC UPS started to act funny about the third day with power restored, and appears to no longer be switching over to battery power instantaneously like it should. What this ultimately did to our main Windows 2003 Server is cause the RAID-1 drive sets to constantly re-synch as the server was re-booted. Power finally flickered at a particularly inopportune moment (System Volume Information update), and we lost the capability to boot! ERD Commander 2003 to the rescue! With this great tool, we were able to find lost volumes, backing up all of our data to a USB external drive, and then run the Microsoft Automated System Recovery with a backup set created when the system was first set up. Then the files were all XCOPY'd from the USB drive back to their respective locations on the server in Safe Mode with Command Prompt (thanks, Jude for the tip). This was not a fast process by any means; it took over three days! Meanwhile, stub web sites were created on my workstation, an email server was installed on a VMWare Windows 2003 Server instance (also running on my workstation), and our NAT router was re-configured to point to the VMWare server for HTTP, SMTP and POP3. The only problem we ran into was that the Email server was now behind two NAT routers (LinkSys and VMWare), so some POP3 servers rejected emails from our 'domain'.
Meanwhile, we track Hurricane Frances. To be continued...