LILO crashed then HD crashed

This is the part I really hate and the part that I'm not good enough at. When I try to fix something I break something else. :(

I broke LILO after compiling a new kernel. I had to boot from floppy. That was fine. Then I decided to remove LILO (do I really need it?) but now have "Invalid partition table". (The instructions I found on the net said to dd boot.003 to /dev/hda),

I can't mount the drive from a floppy so I can't fdisk it and my box will see the drive only if the pins are set to "master" so I'm unable to access it from another drive. At this point, booting it would be great but it would be good enough for now if I could simply mount it so that I can access the data.

I'm stuck. Can anyone help?

Thanks,
Michael

Boot from a live cd like slax
then you can fdisk it, but if the partition table is corrupted, and you
didn't write down the sizes of your partitions, your data may be
lost. BTW, I don't think you need to mount the drive to run fdisk
on it.

Thanks. I manage to get a DOS boot disk and ran FDISK /MBR and now LILO now tries to boot but gets only to LI. However a fdisk from my root floppy shows that the partition table is corrupted--and it thinks it's a smaller drive then it is. (If I ever wrote down the partition sizes it is long gone.) Any hope? If not, do those data recovery companies really work?

Thanks,
Michael