Discovering the secrets held by a 'blank' partiton

[digip]

ntldr is the windows kernel (I still believe). but that's only the surface problem, the actual problem is that (at a guess) 90% of the file system is gone.

ntldr is like boot.ini for win95/98. You can't load windows without it, its like the mbr telling it where the drive starts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTLDR

If there was a physical file ntldr.exe, it was probably a virus. http://www.auditmypc.com/process/ntldr.asp

[Sparda]

Good news. Took 4 days or so but EnCase was able to recover most (if not all) of the important stuff. Still don't have a wtf clue as to what happened. If it was a skiddie, they got pwned :P.