i have a cel 1Ghz pc with 128mb sdram and 40gb harddisk. i have six partitions.of which five are formatted using fat32 and the last one is not formatted. my brother needs windows 98 and i need windows professional and redhat linux to accompolish that, first i loaded win98 on c drive and windows professional on d drive then after that i loaded linux redhat 7.1(server) on the unformatted space. Everything was working fine, until yesterday when my brother inserted some sort of Cd and to his dismay started giving problems. explorer.exe got corrupted. To correct the same windows 98 was reloaded so that my settings would not change. Now i don't get the initial screen where linux asks us whether you want linux or dos. nor does the partition is visible through fdisk. my harddisk does not contain any data. if i want i can format it but i want to recover my linux operating system back without reformatting or reinistalling can anyone help me.

Boot off your linux emergency boot disk (the one you created during setup...right?) and then just re-run lilo as root. If you don't have a floppy, you could try booting off the linux CD passing: linux root=/dev/hdXX where hdXX is your root linux partition. This should at least get you into linux from where you can run lilo/grub.