I need some expert help, and would appreciate any feedback on the following problem:

After power outage the machine didn't allow the login. When we checked it , it looked like both disks were completely empty. Luckily, we have a backup machine, and we can restore the disks.

Has anybody seen anything like this before ?
What could cause such a dramatic outcome, and what can be done to prevent further problems ?

I have no clue where I can start looking for explanation. So maybe somebody could help me which files I could take a look at and what are the best steps to perform in my situation ?

Thanks in advance,
Regards
Dennis

This won't be much help. But the only thing I can think of that would cause your disks to appear erased like that is if the filesystems were damaged badly when the power spike hit your system. There is a tiny chance if you can somehow boot into maintenance mode (maybe booting off of CD or whatever) you could run fsck against your disks and repair them. But I've never seen damage that bad be fixable before.

The other possibility is that some damage was done to the cables or hardware of the disk itself. Or you were using a non-default device path and the boot prom got wiped out so now it can't find the boot disk. Stuff like that could also cause a problem like you describe I suppose.

If you have backups that is probably easier than trying to fix it. . . .

Or it could be a new sysadmin did a rm -r /

Thanks for the help !
Now I understand the cause of the problem. "\rm -r" was unfortunately not an option in this case

Thanks for the feedbacks !
I guess I will just restore the system from spare disc.
Regards,
Dennis