Two years experience with Linux. Never seen anything like this before - nothing I could find on other threads

Drive setup:
Main drive: A large drive (150GB) split into 4 primary partitions. First partition - (bootable) fat32 running win98. Second - ntfs running winxp. Third - split into swap and two ext3 for running Linux (mandriva). Fourth - ext3 with backup data

Second drive: 18GB ext3 unused

What I did:
Windows 98 was behaving badly (surprise surprise) so I reinstalled it. After the reinstall my partitions were altered. NOTE - at no time during the reinstall was there any indication that partitions were being altered.

the result:
Now my Main drive has two primary partitions. The first (hda1) is as before. The second (hda2) is ntfs - filling the remaining space in the drive. It is as if installing win98 has caused the ntfs partition to swallow up the linux partitions without a trace.

attempts to diagnose/remedy:
Running from (CD bootable) Mepis as a rescue. Analysis from fdisk shows only the two partitions. The same from qtparted. No sign of anything Linux.

Trying to crack the nut with e2fsck (not really knowing what I am doing) gives the following message:

root@ttyp1[demo]# e2fsck -b 8193 /mnt/hda2/
e2fsck 1.36-rc3 (18-Jan-2005)
e2fsck: Is a directory while trying to open /mnt/hda2/

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

help:
Can I retrieve the data from the missing Linux partitions? can I restore my mandriva operating system?

I've never heard of a Windows 98 installation extending an XP NTFS, but there are two lessons you should learn from this:

1. Before you install anything on your computer, you should always back up your data.
2. Windows doesn't play nice with Linux. That's why, whenever people talk about dual-boots, they always advise installing Windows first, then installing Linux.

If Mepis doesn't see the partitions, I'm afraid they're gone. What does df say when you type it in the terminal?

Thanks for the reply.

df does not locate the missing partitions

I tried to recover using the advice I found (after considerable googling) at:
http://www.linux-france.org/article/.../howto/t1.html

Did not work

I backed up a few days ago so lost very little.

If I'm not mistaking, you should use e2fsck on the device itself, not on the mount point, so you should pass as parameter /dev/hda2 instead of /mnt/hda2. Also, the device must not be mounted.
On the other hand, df won't show anything unless the partition is mounted so it's no use trying to run df from a CD if you can't mount the partition.

Exactly. All boobs should get this lesson.