Help! FAT magic number corrupted!

[me <slandrum@cs.smith.edu>]

Hi all---

I'm new to Linux, and in the process of hacking cluelessly with my
hard-drive setup I've managed to trash some vital part of my hard drive.
Here's the general setup: 

/dev/hda1  (~100MB)  Win95, formerly bootable, formerly DOS
/dev/hda2  (~16MB)   linux swap
/dev/hda3  (~200mb)   linux main: bootable, mounted as /
/dev/hda4  (0)
/dev/hda5  (~75mb)   linux /var
/dev/hda6  (~250mb)  linux /usr

a few days ago, i was hacking on something (LILO?), and flipped the
"bootable" flag on /dev/hda1 to OFF. I also changed /dev/hda1 from a DOS
partition to a Win95 FAT16 LBA partition, not thinking that this might
pose a problem. (/dev/hda1 has win95 loaded on it, but I corrupted all the
long filenames when I was repartitioning it. when it was labeled as a DOS
partition, I could get into it using linux.) cfdisk returned an error as
it was trying to write; silly me, i didn't write down what it said, but i
figured nothing was seriously wrong. I rebooted. when I rebooted, I got an
error:

Kernel Panic: [something to the effect of, this drive's f*ed up] 03:01

I looked around and found a rootboot disk on the net (tomsrtbt), dutifully
created it using another computer, and booted from a floppy. (My Debian
rootboot disk wasn't working, still isn't, dunno why. <sigh>) Using a boot
floppy, I can mount and read /dev/hda3 just fine, but I can't seem to run
any of the binaries on it. (for example, cfdisk). I can't get into
/dev/hda1 at all.

So: is there a way to fix the hard drive, and /dev/hda1, without losing
significant amounts of data? If so, what is it? 

Thanks in advance. 

-Renee Landrum
slandrum@cs.smith.edu (main)     ----- southern_grrl@iname.com (forwarding)