10.4 server can’t log in, can’t change password from CD

Hi, everyone. I just joined and this is my first forum post here ever. I have dutifully read all 74 pages of forum posts and skimmed any relevant articles. We have (had) a well-behaved server running on G4 dual that took a dive yesterday after an intern pulled the IEC power plug on the running server!!!!! The boot drive is a standard IDE that we clone automatically every day to a firewire using Synchronize Pro X. I am not the Server administrator, but I own the company and my admin is my employee and he can't work the number of hours I really would need to get everything fixed all the time. So I'm the dead horse that has to be beat when we run into a big snag like this. Monday my admin will be back on the job and we'll try to attack this together. The login window either gives the shakes or waits 10 minutes after the colored beach ball spins and then the beachball stops and I can't get past the login window. My intern may not have corrupted anything that wasn't ready to be a problem, since BOTH firewire boot drive clones that we regularly make exhibit the same problem. I suspect that a corruption got cloned to the clones! All I can think of is that since the last server update some configuration file in the user folder has gone missing or gotten corrupted, and we've been blissfully unaware of the problem until this restart. The Install CD's "change password" utility shows that there are NO USERS with passwords to change on the boot disc or on either of the two firewire clones! I ran disc utility's repair and it reported nothing wrong with the boot disc. I booted from a regular OSX firewire disc and I downloaded and ran Apple's OSX server 10.4.8 software update and ran it on one of my clones but it didn't fix the problem. Still can't get past the login screen on that "repaired" clone. I'm definitely not terminal-centric, so I use a real nice GUI finder replacement called "Pathfinder" on regular OSX. Booting from that OSX firewire boot disc in root, runnning pathfinder---I can see the Server boot disc. The user and the usual hidden folders appear to be there and "intact" on a cursory inspection. My next thought was that I shoudl do an install over the old install, like we can do when regular OSX gets corrupted. But it appears that Tiger server only allows an erase and install option! What is this crap? Oh my... is there no way to do a Tiger Server upgrade or "repair" install while retaining all config, plist and other files? Apple sure makes OSX easy, but fixing the server is not! So, I'm running out of ideas... I told my assistant that he had to learn how to save Server configuration files, but he never found the time, so we don't have any way of making a new server and then importing config files because we never made them. There's a lot of important services that we run on this Server (from Mail to ftp server to Windows active directory server to a secure online store website). Fortunately I set up a backup mail from Go Daddy in our DNS so we can send and receive mail, and I didn't lose more than a few pop messages. On Monday all hell is going to break loose, so I would appreciate any ideas or advice you might have. Is there a way to do a fresh install (on a firewire for the moment to be safe) and then copy the entire contents of the home folder from the original boot drive and then reboot and everything will be magic? Can anyone tell me the critical files I can copy from the old boot drive and try to get going if it turns out I have to do a fresh server install... Starting again from scratch would be a real pain! Thanks a lot in advance.