I think that I may have a problem... My partner handles all of the netware support and he went on vacation this morning! One of my clients called this morning and said that their novell server wouldn't boot. Sure enough, when I examined it, it wasn't booting. It was sitting at the dos prompt c:\ and the last few lines read like this.. cd \nwserver invalid directory specified when I try to cd \nwserver it gives the same error message... I tried Ghosting the disc and booting from it but that didn't work. I didn't think that it would work, but I thought that maybe I would be able to see some files in the nwserver directory. I also booted this ghost image with a win98 boot floppy and there are no files in the nwserver directory. Anyone have any ideas?

I have no idea why you would mess with Ghost unless you were RESTORING the previously ghosted c: drive. So you ran chkdsk right? No drive issues? But the folder is empty? Sounds like someone accidently deleted the folders contents. We know server.exe was there. So was startup.ncf and any driver files needed on initial load. Where's your backup or documentation of the ncf?

Thanks for your reply! The reason for Ghost is that I don't have any experience with NetWare, and I didn't want to permanently damage any data. Also, we have had some drives go bad, but we have found that if you ghost them early enough most of the time you can save the data. As the client has data on the drive I didn't want to take any chances. Yes, the client was considering implementing a backup process, but hasn't yet... (I'll bet that it will be more important now...) I think i found chkdsk in the drdos directory today and ran it. I'm not sure that it worked properly though, what are the switches that I should use?

From your explanation, I feel that somebody has deleted the NWServer directory itself or the OS might have got installed in a different directory.(Remember you can install the Boot files in another directory other than C:\NWSERVER) To find out where it was installed, try to explore the content of Autoexec.bat, where you will find an entry to start the Server.exe file from a Directory. Second option is to give the command "C:\>Dir Server.exe /s", which will list you the directories where the Server.exe file is located. Go(Change) to the directory and run Server.exe. If you don't find the file, possibly you may have to go with Installing the OS again. Beware that you don't delete any volumes in the Hard Disk while installing again, so that you don't play with the data. Revert back...