Messed up MBR and partition table...

[A_THE_K]

First off, I did some pretty stupid things. I have Win98 SE installed on my system. I was getting interested in using Linux so I fetched Mandrake 8.2 and installed it.

Windows had shifted partition names around so I had to change a whole bunch of file associations. No big problem yet.

Then I did something really stupid: I added a Linux partition at some point, clicked the wrong button and presto! Linux wouldn't start up anymore.

So, I decided to uninstall Linux by removing its partitions with PartitionMagic but first replacing the MBR with the windows 98 one so only windows would boot. I used the win98 startup disk that has fdisk on it.

I booted from the diskette and ran "fdisk /mbr" to overwrite the current MBR with a (supposedly) valid one. Everything seemed to be fine. Then I booted up Windows.

No files have been lost, and the partitions are still visible from Windows. However, the extended partition on my first disk is now going incredibly slowly when being accessed, and Win98 takes AGES to recognizes the other partitions that are inside the extended one.

If I run PartitionMagic, I can't do anything with my first disk and get a #120 error. Dos won't recognize the extended partition and the partitions inside it. Norton DiskDoctor sees a problem, but recovers a bogus partition that shouldn't exist anymore and deletes the other ones. Recovery programs tell me my MBR and partition table are invalid, but don't fix anything. Also, many programs I've found so far claim "great data recovery" but I still have my data, at least under Windows.

How can I fix the MBR and partition table so that everything will work properly again? I'm begging for help!

(I'm not sure whether my PC config is needed, but I'll post it if necessary.)