EMERGENCY: LILO can't load Win95 / Mount fails

[Stefan Baums <sbaums@gmx.net>]

Hello all!

I have a Win95 partition here with important data on it (and no recent
backups, of course...) which I can no longer boot from or access from
GNU/Linux.  The setup is: 

   hda1 contains what cfdisk calls "Win95 FAT32 (LBA)" (the lost
   Win95 partition)
   
   hda2 is Linux Swap

   hda3 is unused

   hda4 contains a Debian 2.0 base system

LILO was set up to automatically boot Win95.  The only major thing we
did was install Ghostscript 6.01 for Windows, then next day when we
turned the computer back on, LILO got stuck in booting after printing
"LI" on screen.

I then went into the Debian 2.0 system with a rescue disk, wrote a
series of lilo.conf's, ran lilo, rebooted.  The result was always that
LILO got to the point where it told me

     "LILO: Loading win." 

and then got stuck, retried, and repeated the message over and over
again.  The lilo.conf's looked like this:

	boot=/dev/hda
	vga=normal
	delay=20
	other=/dev/hda1
	label=win

Then I tried to mount the Win95 partition from GNU/Linux to save the
most important data, but the result of "mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt"
is:

  [MS-DOS FS Rel. 12,FAT 0,check=n,conv=b,uid=0,gid=0,umask=022,bmap]
  [me=0x85,cs=0,#f=81,fs=0,fl=32512,ds=12032,de=58188,data=15668,se=38200,ts=74624,ls=9471,rc=0,fc=4294967295]
  Transaction block size = 512
  VFS: Can't find a valid MSDOS filesystem on dev 03:01.
  mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda1,
	 or too many mounted file systems

Finally, I tried the crappy Windows "QuickRestore" CD we got with the
computer, which only allows you to completely reformat your harddisk,
or to run a virus check.  I just did the latter, and the interesting
thing is that the virus checker did scan all the files on the Windows
partition, so they are still there, and this program could access
them.

Can anybody provide help with this problem?

Many thanks in advance,
Stefan and Jenny

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PGP-ID: 4AF752D0