The problem that some people do not understand about programming is that programmers cannot read your mind. While people have low opinion of indian programmers, to be honest, they are fairly smart, but also limited to the amount of time they are going to dedicate themselves to a task as developing a program for a customer.

The thing to understand about programming, is that it is a 'give and take' situation. The programmer presents a model for someone, and it needs the user to bounce back information if something is not done. The major problem also is that it takes weeks of talking and outlining exactly what is needed and also requires the programmer to give a model and show it to the customer to make sure it works that way. Given the time difference between India and the US, the real time 'give and take' sessions are reduced to innocuous e-mails or messages and vague interpretations which often leads to incomplete or incorrect implementations.

I have seen less educated programmers on this side of the world who have pumped out reasonable programs mostly because they have the customer-programmer interaction, which facilitates proper changes, albiet the coding is still haphazard or terribly implemented.

First thing I would recommend is plan out a restructure and rebuild of the setup. List off the critical needs and why they need to be covered. The problem most companies do not understand about IT is that in the process of cost cutting, the critical structures your previous guy was forced to skimp on will cost the company in the long run due to you trying to maintain as much as you can. Underline the need for the restructure to avoid meltdown. The upper management needs to understand that while you can try to support with minimal costs, the catastrophic repercussions come up when you have no fall back due to cost cutting and the number of days it takes to get new hardware or rebuilding of a system back to the level of functionality. A minimum of 2 days to get systems back to functionality and a dead stop to any other support while the critical systems are being rebuilt. As someone else mentioned, hiring additional support will help, but it will not help in the situation of a production level dead stop due to critical systems not having redundacy or planned upgradability. Lastly, underline the necessity to not cut back on maintenance. Running at bare minimum and no maintenance support will cause long term cost overruns as being the only person who has to maintain it will also cause long term burn out and higher turn around of IT workers, which will cost them again in the long run.

I'm sort of a low-level Sysadmin and I know of no simple or easy process that exists right now for what you want to do. Anrego's suggestion is as close as to something you wanted. I saw someone else post Ghost, which is only good for imaging a drives, however, it isn't ideal for a situation where if you want to 'bring it back' if you don't have the major portion of the 'same hardware' (Namely the Motherboard and its chipset), as imaging back a hard drive or 'transplanting' an OS from one system to another with dissimilar motherboards results in Windows going BSOD due to a harden HAL setup. Also, Ghost was never designed to do Gov/Mil disk wiping like what you are asking. I don't believe anyone has considered doing a software based mass disk wiping, as some resort to the more extreme method of large stack of drives and a large electromagnet to do that process or doing what you are doing right now.