Data Recovery Software for 2.5 GB HDD ?

[Web Gecko]

Howdy

My brother in law has a Celeron 266MHZ (Win 98 1E) system which stopped booting for him the other day (DISK BOOT failure).
He has (or had) Win 98 1E on his primary master 2.5GB drive
(haven't cracked the case yet so don't know which make/model)
and he has a primary slave 850 MB drive for storage.

The BIOS/Setup detects both drives but the main drive
won't boot Windows. After I boot with a start floppy,
fdisk reports that it can't see any partitions on the main 2.5GB
HDD but it can see the partition on the 850MB storage drive.
The result is that DOS assigns drive C: to the storage drive
which is the first fixed disk it finds with a primary partition.
Normally the 2.5GB drive would be assigned C: and the
storage drive would be D: .

The storage drive is formatted FAT32 so it's likely the main drive
was also formatted FAT32.

Obviously something has hit the partition info on the main drive.
The drive may be OK and a repartition/reformat and reload in
order. The drive may also be dead which I have not verified
thus far. The simple way to suss this is usually just to attempt to create the primary partition with FDISK. If the fdisk succeeds
then the drive is usually OK but you never know until your format
and reload is complete and everything works consistently.

The reason I have not used fdisk yet is in the hope that some of the files (maybe the whole partition ? a big ask I know) may be recoverable before I reload the system. If I can recover some of the data on the main drive I will before I reload.

Is there any DOS software out there that can help me recover some of the files or maybe the whole partition ? Unfortunately there was no recovery system in place such as Norton System Works etc.. The main drive may have been formatted FAT32. Without a partition, DOS will not assign a drive letter so specialised software would have to be able to access the drive directly while getting around the standard DOS file handleing requirements (guessing here) ? Can Scan Disk help with this one ?

Any ideas or info would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

The Web Gecko

[HAL9000]

First thing, did it go down on Friday? That's the anniversary trigger date for the CIH virus. You can try a recovery tool at www.grc.com to get it back.

[HAL9000]

Closed, double posted.