Sharepoint Services 2003 Upgrade Lost Data

We have recently had an IT guy perforn the upgrade from wss 2.0 to wss 3.0 and we have since lost the entire database architecture and I believe the data stored therein. Is there someplace on the server where the data records could be stored and has anyone had similar problems with this type of upgrade? The IT firm says it's a problem with a security patch from microsoft but I can't find anythying referencing that online.

The following may provide some background on what transpired and how it has been handled thus far; these are from correspondence between our company and the IT firm in chronological order:

Our initial inquiry:
5/23 We have several questions regarding the upgrade of the SPS software, not the least of which being why was the upgrade performed without any advance notice to our office, this notice would have allowed us to take the precaution of having our people save their work in progress and prevented the loss of data and time that we experienced. In the future we would ask that we be shown the professional courtesy of prior notification before commencing any major work to the server environment.

At about 1:00 yesterday all of the computers at the shop went down, we contacted (IT REP) and he said that you had started the install of the 3.0 software that morning and at the time he said that the install was complete.

And since that time we have had multiple problems with the system. First we have no remote access, and receive a server error of the server application is not available, the lay-out of the pages does not process properly ie…the column order displays in a random sequence and not as called for in the column settings. The default page now has the added search feature however the format of the prior software has been retained which causes the navigation of that particular page to differ from the rest of the site.

Please contact us as soon as possible, as (COMPANY OWNER) has no access to the system and no e-mail.
Reply from IT Rep:
5/24 IT REP worked on the phone for over 7 hours yesterday. The Microsoft Tech and IT REP agreed to continue this morning. I know as of last night the remote portion of the Companyweb and the internal site were functioning. However, they are continuing to work to retrieve the existing data.

Did you ever add the other external hard drive to your backup rotation? If so, please let IT REP know. I have meeting this morning until 11:30, if you need anything please contact IT REP.

We will discuss what caused the problem and future prevention after all is resolved.
Our response:
5/25 I am inquiring as to the progress toward restoration of the company web. As you are already aware, the data contained in the company web is crucial to the day to day operation of our business. We are not able to access any of our scheduling information for installations, production or customer service issues. While we have been able to track most of these items thus far, the amount of information available for scheduling next week is quite limited.

It would be helpful to have some indication of when we expect to be restored as well as an estimate of the percentage of data which may be lost, so that we can begin to formulate our response to the situation.

I am certain that you and IT REP understand just how serious the consequences of this situation can become, and assume that you will be capable of providing us with periodic updates as to your progress.

I would also be interested to find out if there are plans to work this out over the weekend or if it has been decided to place this on the back burner and resume restoration of our vital data on tuesday. IT Reply:
5/25 At this point, this is a Microsoft issue that they are working on to resolve – I’m only facilitating their ability to access the server and work. I am doubtful that they work on the weekend, but I will find out. IT REP and I have spent roughly 25 hours in the last 2.5 days working on this, myself until almost midnight last night, so he and I are putting forth every conceivable effort to resolve this. In the mean time, I have turned off the automatic updates (which are enabled by default) to prevent this type of thing from happening again. Keep in mind that if there were 2 hard drives being used in a rotation as IT REP suggested, we’d have backups from before the failed patch to revert to.

As soon as I have any indication of a target time for resolution, I will not hesitate to let you know.Our next question:
5/25 Have we checked to hard drive that is currently in use to see if there is anything salvageable on there. Isn't the server partitioned and mirrored?Latest IT correspodence:
5/25 I have a few suggestions from microsoft that we were going to try, but it looks as though someone took the external drive off the server, so we were unable to do it. I was just checking to see that someone did do that, and that it's in a safe place until it can be reconnected.. The server uses a RAID 5, not mirroring. Mirroring wouldn't matter either, as in a mirrored configuration, 2 drives mirror each other - when the primary is written to, the secondary (mirror) is immediately updated. I'm pretty sure we can get the data files (.dwg, .xls. ,doc, etc) out of the sharepoint database, but we'll need the drive reconnected. The Microsoft engineers have left for the day, but we'll be back on it next week on Tues when they're back in.