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[SuperDwarf]

I'm new to Dwarf Fortress and this is my first fort.  I recently survived a were-panda attack that killed 15 of my 19 dwarves, along with most of my animals. There are now 40 corpses that I have to deal with. Two of my survivors are infected and due to transform at the next full moon. I plan to execute them before this happens, but I need to build an archery target to train a marksdwarf for it. I'm very confident that these problems can all be overcome and I'm relying on the next influx of migrants to save my population and restore my work force. There's just one problem that I can't overcome; my dwarves aren't working, no matter what I do.
Most of my workshops were destroyed but they won't build new ones or do work that doesn't pertain to workshops.
Path finding is not an issue because I see the dwarves ambling downstairs to frolic amongst the bodies freely.
Yes the game is unpaused.
They will move if I put them into a squad and ask them to go somewhere, they respect civilian alerts and burrows also.
I have a very long job list (I was building a wall). I've tried cancelling as much of it as I know how to, but that didn't solve the problem. They won't even do things that they were doing previously, like farming. I looked at their thoughts and preferences, they aren't traumatised. For example one of my survivors did the killing in his warepanda form so he didn't feel anything after seeing all of his friends die, another feels uneasy but he didn't see the massacre happen.
I am using dwarf therapist. I have the lazy noob pack running, so if the answer lies in one of it's other utilities I can use those too.
If you can help me to get my dwarves working again, I'd be very grateful. Thank you.

[Fleeting Frames]

Hm, could it be something like repeated attempts to give water immediatelly cancelled resulting in No Job? Recently saw a case where whole fortress stood idle due that, fixed it by disabling all labours but mining on a dwarf and having them go to caverns.

[PatrikLundell]

Yes, as Fleeting Frames indicated, turning off job cancellation spam reports (as was done in the fortress referenced) hits you hard when suddenly nothing is happening.

I definitely would spend my effort on getting the fortress back on track rather than archery training and do the quick fix for the weres, which is to brick them in (the best case is to have them do the wall building themselves, but there's a significant risk they won't stand on the desired side of the wall). When things are back on track, were elimination could be given a higher priority.

If most of your fortress pop has been eliminated, it presumably also means that most of your job assignments have been eliminated as well, so you'd need to reassign jobs to the remaining dorfs, and remove assignments to jobs that aren't needed immediately.
Corpse hauling is likely to be very important, so the corpses are out of the way when new migrants come, but it might be overshadowed by the need for coffins to bury them in, and slabs to put their souls to rest if you can't produce coffins fast enough.

To trouble shoot, you can either make the save available to the forum (using DFFD http://dffd.bay12games.com/, for instance) for others to help you, or you can try to identify the issues yourself. Forgetting to remove civ alert burrows is one common problem (doesn't sound like it's the cause in your case, though), cancellation spam where the same job is taken and immediately dropped another (often caused by civ alerts blocking dorfs from actually performing jobs outside the burrow, but not to take the jobs). Locked doors or other path blocking measures will also stop jobs at the inaccessible location (without any cancellation spam: the job are correctly filtered away before they're assigned).

Thus, I'd check that the correct jobs are assigned on the remaining dorfs, look for cancellation messages, and look for other indications of what jobs they are taking and which ones they are not. Corpse hauling, for instance, will stop once the corpse (NOT refuse!) stockpile is full, which can easily happen after a massacre. Workshop (re)building typically requires one of the jobs performed in the workshop (check the wiki if you're uncertain), and some building tasks requires an architect job to collect the pieces followed by an assembly job using the appropriate job skill.

[cyrohound]

Basically this ^. What's probably happening is some high priority job can't get done but the dwarves keep trying to do it anyway, because it is high priority. Another, less likely, option is that your dwarves don't have the correct jobs enabled to get them to do what you want. For example, in my forts, I manually make it so that about 1/5 of my dwarves have no hauling besides trade good hauling enabled, because I don't want them to haul stuff, I want them to keep making furniture/digging/etc. and hauling is less important to me than ensuring my new migrants have a move in ready room waiting for them, or that my military has a surplus of armor and such to choose from.

[SuperDwarf]

I just fired up the world now, I tried disabling everything but mining on one of my survivors, but they remained idle. My memory is fuzzy but I believe that before the massacre, I put my dwarves in a large burrow that they should have been working in, it contained all of my workshops and enough stockpiled materials for them. Path finding wasn't an issue. They wouldn't drink for some reason even though I had a small supply of alcohol for them. The mass werepanda attack was likely caused by several of them dying because of dehydration at once. I believe there was an announcement about a bucket. I ignored it though, because I read about a bug that would cause dwarves in burrows to abandon and reaccept jobs repeatedly which would cause spam in the announcements.
I did try enabling corpse hauling but they wouldn't do it for some reason.  It's very possible that I'm simply not doing these things correctly. I followed this sequence to manage labours. u for unit list, z to view unit, p for preferences, turn off combat and miscellaneous with c and m, use the + and- keys to navigate and enter to disable and enable labours. Am I doing something wrong? Do I need to clear the job list before dwarves will take on new jobs?
I have a mason but he wouldn't build a masons workshop, even with construction on. I am getting a notification that says "miner cancels store item in stockpile: Drop off inaccessible" I don't know what that means. Every part of my fortress is accessible as far as I can tell. Unless bodies block 1 wide openings? I tried removing and recreating my stockpiles right next to the dwarvs but still nothing. My fort has partially mined areas that remain unfinished.

[PatrikLundell]

"something about a bucket" is probably the cause, I'd guess.

If you don't have any buckets and a hospitalized dorf is thirsty, the fortress can grind to a halt because everyone is trying to fulfill the high priority job of giving the dorf water (hospitalized dorfs only drink water [presumably to encourage them to get out of there as quickly as possible ]), only to drop the job once they find no bucket is available. The same happens if there is no water source (such as having only surface water and it's frozen).
You can get out of that by disabling the hospital.

I believe you run into the same situation if you run out of booze (or the booze is inaccessible) and dorfs start to get thirsty without a water source (they'll drink water directly from the source if they can get there, so a free bucket isn't completely necessary).
Also note that buckets assigned to the hospital are so precious that they may never be used (including for bringing water to hospitalized dorfs, which obviously is a bug). Removing buckets from the hospital (e.g. by removing the container they're in from the zone) should free them up for general use.

[anewaname]

Protect your non-infected dwarfs....
You have less than a month to get the infected secured. Use the military orders to station the infected behind doors and then lock the doors (to prevent other dwarfs from attempting to bring water to them or entering that room). If you leave the infected with station orders, they should not attempt to destroy the locked door when they transform. You should be able to leave them there for years.

Once the infected are secured, worry about your other two dwarfs.

[Iduno]

Don't worry about killing the werecreatures, just lock them away. Worst case, you just pump magma in through the ceiling later when you have enough dwarves to deal with building-type projects.

But when you've lost 14/17 dwarves, the rest will almost certainly be too insane to work. Hold out until a migrant wave comes, and use those 40 soap-carvers to rebuild.

[Fleeting Frames]

For 1-tile walling in, builder of a screw pump will stand on its walkable tile to finish the pump, so they can get locked in if you build it in a 2x1 space. Otherwise, they'll typically stand on the side the item was closer from.

1) Werepandas don't relate to dehydration.

2) You have burrow or civilian alert on, I'm thinking. The miner keeps endlessly trying to pick up an item, realizing they cannot get it and cancelling. There was recently a case where a dwarf kept trying to pasture a cat who climbed away even after disabling the jobs; making them active military for a moment fixed this.

Locking doors in the way would also stop stockpiling jobs, as would forbidding all items (but those wouldn't stop lack of buckets making them idle; rather would cause it).

[SuperDwarf]

Thanks for your help guys, I just deleted all of my burrows and that fixed the problem. I had no civilian alerts on but I didn't realise that adding dwarves to burrows meant activating them. Is there a way to turn them off?
You're right, killing off the werebeasts now would be silly, I'm sure I can find a use for them later. Military perhaps? I might start a thread and crowd source some ideas later. I know that the wiki has a few ideas already.
For now though, it's the 12th of moonstone so I have until the 4th of opal (which is next month) before the next full moon and I plan to get some work out of my two infected dwarves while I still can.
I hope that's a good Idea, is it? Can they still infect me (or my dwarves rather)? If my two clean dwarves carry dead bodies, will they become infected?

[PatrikLundell]

No, unfortunately there's no way to disable burrows short of adding/removing people to them.

Note that using the weres is risky business. They may decide to go to Socialize!, get new clothes, or whatever, and suddenly you find that they're not safely contained when they turn...

The were curse is transmitted only through a were drawing blood through a bite, so corpse hauling is safe from a transmission perspective (diseases might be added during the 2030'es or so, though).