[KLUG Members] Lost partition table!

[Martindale-Towne]

Hi :
	I have this "Powernotebooks.com" notebook which is a compal n30  Over the last six months I've pretty much gotten everthing to work with mandrake8.1 including the lucent winmodem(works great), the 
onboard network card. I wouldn't recommend the savage twister video which has good support with X win 4.2 but no open GL support.  Anyway my problem occurred a few days ago when I "lost my partition table" 
and couldn't get linux.  Fdisk showed those partitions were gone and wierd ones in their place (I booted a rescue disk).  However windows was only slightly fazed and ran after removing lilo and doing a "sys" 
command.  I had 2 Ext3 partitions plus swap that are gone that were on an extended partion which began immediately after fat32.  My feeling is that the win partition encroached the ext partition (scandisk sometimes 
reports a discrep;ancy of size).  Of course I did not back up my partition table or a lot of the data on the partitions themselves, but I would surely like to restore my system without laboriously having to reinstall everthing 
again.  I've used 2 programs first testdisk a dos program which gave me a printout of the parttion information, and rescuept on the mandrake disk.  This infor must not be exactly right as I haven't been able to restore 
the partitions yet.  Is it possible with the above scenario that the beginning of the extended part was wiped out  and that I won't be able to restore the system?  Is my HD beginning to go bad?.   Any ideas or 
suggestions?   Thanks   Jon