imap database and store have gone missing

After removing the boot drive from one machine and inserting into an exact speced machine. Machine started locking up. Looked in the console and its scrolling mail errors.

Jul 21 16:58:44 ts500 imap[5558]: executed

Jul 21 16:58:44 ts500 imap[5558]: IOERROR: opening /var/imap/mailboxes.db: Input/output error

Jul 21 16:58:44 ts500 imap[5558]: DBERROR: opening /var/imap/mailboxes.db: cyrusdb error

Jul 21 16:58:44 ts500 imap[5558]: Fatal error: can't read mailboxes file

Jul 21 16:58:44 ts500 master[4752]: service imap pid 5558 in READY state: terminated abnormally

Jul 21 16:58:44 ts500 imap[5559]: DBERROR: dbenv->open '/var/imap/db' failed: Input/output error

Jul 21 16:58:44 ts500 imap[5559]: DBERROR: init() on berkeley

Jul 21 16:58:44 ts500 imap[5559]: DBERROR: reading /var/imap/db/skipstamp, assuming the worst: Input/output error

I turned off imap to stop the madness and went looking for the store and db, they are both missing. They should be in their dedault location of var/imap and var/spool/imap but both directories are empty now. Under maintenance > Databse the size of both database and store is 0. There is a 30,000 message mailbox that is just gone.

machine is dual 2GHz G5 running 10.4.11 Server.

So my question is, what in the world??!