How to get back a lost partition.

[Froghead]

Had a customer bring his Toshiba laptop the other day that wouldn't boot to Windows95.
I flash it up and see that the config.sys and autoexec.bat are pointing to the a:drive, windows is miising system files, there are different versions of command.com laying around. I scratch my head and start changing, renaming files etc to get Windows to boot. No luck. Ok lets just re-install windows over top. No problem, everything seems to be back to normal, Windows works, devices are OK, programs I see are working.
I take the money and say thank you very much!
Next day the phone rings. "Where's all my stuff on the other drive???" "Ahh... what other drive?" Well the drive was partitioned and I can't get to the stuff on the other drive" "OK, bring it back and we'll fix it up"

I get it back and run fdisk and here's what I see.

Partition 1 non dos 399MB unknown system
Partition 2 C Active PRI DOS 398MB FAT16

It appears that I have installed Windows to what was the "D" drive. I was a little confused because I installed their WIN95 Upgrade VerA and I could swear that they had WIN95B and no DOS on that drive. I still don't how that upgrade worked.
Anyways, how can I get the first partition turned back to being "C" without doing an fdisk/format and losing the DATA that was on it. Please keep in mind this is a laptop and I can't pull the drive.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[AlienDyne]

I would first use Partition Magic to convert it to FAT16 and then see if the Data is accessible.
I've heard that Spinrite does a fine job also. Then again, PowerQuest Lost-And-Found is excellent.

Good luck!

[Froghead]

I'll give those a whirl.
Thanks.

[EvilCabbage]

I definately second Alien on "lost & found" really a great program !

[janus83]

it sounds like that if the o/s was setup originally with 95 b that 95a would not be able to see it especially if the "B" partition is fat32. A way around that is to try booting to a 95b or greater floppy disk. Then see if you can view the contents of the first "c" drive. You can tell the OS Version of the Command.com by looking at the time stamp 95a/upgrade time stamp is 9:50a
95b/c time stamp 11:11a 98 second edition time stamp is 10:22a i forgot the 98 first edition stamp. If the command.com or io.sys or msdos.sys is missing (use dir /ah command to see msdos and IO.sys files.) then use the floppy disk and sys c: the drive. (copy the sys.com file from another computer of the same version of the boot disk located in c:\windows\command directory)hopefully that will work. let me know if that worked out for you.

[Froghead]

Right you are Janus, that appears to be what happened. I had a flash yesterday and ran Fdisk with Win98 bootdisk and sure enough the "invisible" partition is FAT32. I'm going to delete win.com and winver.exe and install Win95B. Hope that works.