I am(was) using win98. I left my computer unattended in win98 and when I got back to it , it had completely locked up. I rebooted, but got an error message that said something like drive not bootable, so I used a bootable floppy and noticed that all partitions were gone. Fdisk didn't find any partitions on the disk, however, using another partition-manager I found about 7 partitions, of which only 2 seemed to be somewhat reasonable(but they didn't quite match the ones I had before the crash). I tried using powerquest's lost&found, but it found only a few files that made any sence. Does anyone know how to recover the files/partitions or know a working partition-guessing software??

From my understanding of this, the only thing that will truly fix it is a low level format. Sounds like your boot sector has gone 'kerplunk!'.

I don't know if I agree with the 'low level format' but it sure looks like sector zero of your hard drive got clobbered. Were you on-line at the time?

Have you tried the freeware version of Easy Recovery by Ontrack? (www.surecool.com). Please post your results.