What to do? In FC3 we have a hard disk of 80 GB. It was originally partitioned as boot (102 MB), root(about 76 GB) and swap (512 MB). It's made with LVM. Now, the problem is that the partition table was lost. There was a powerloss, and the disk is full (32 MB of free space), so that's probably the reason of panic. The disk itself seems to be okay, BIOS finds it when attached in an usb-drive, Windows finds it too, but can't obviously read it.

The system won't start, booting ends with kernel panic. Is there anything else to do than forget whole thing? We should get some data and students home-directories rescued from it. Ofcourse, there's no rescuedisk, bootdisk nor rescue-cd either...

I'm quite new with this kind of problems, so if someone could advice me step by step, I'd be very grateful.

The information I have about the system, is all above, I've never been administering or using that particular system, since we've had other person to deal with it.

how did the Partition table get lost?

If you do not have any other means of booting your system your chances are very slim of getting any data off the disk...
You should try to at least get a live cd from some where or knoppix or download the rescue disk from the fedora web site... Then you might be able to mount the partintion with the data on it and at least get it off to another disk or burn it to dc/dvd.

Yeah, should be able to read it. Just boot from a liceCD (I have only experience with Gentoo liveCD)

Load the dm-mod module "modprobe dm-mod" to enable support for LVM.
Scan for LVM's: "vgscan"
Activate the lvm volumes "vgchange -a y"
Mount the partitions: "mount /dev/vg/home /backup/home"

Do something like above, you could check the LVM HOW-TO found on several websites for more accurate info (google).
Hope this helps you and welcome to LinuxQuestions