partition table problems

[Tyler]

sorry for this long email.

hello. i recently (yesterday) ruined my partition table.

i was running caldera opendos on my small swap-turned-dos partition,
and tried to set it active. told it to restore boot record,
but it was misnamed, and totaled my partition table, i think.
i know my data is not lost - i hope -, and am wondering what i can do to restore it.
the equipment i have available is:
1 386, had a dectalk pc, can always bring that out of my newer pc and put it back, i will do that anyway.
a windows pc, with the dectalk pc moved to it - and the pc that ran linux.
those two pcs - windows and linux - are the same, with a removable hd for the os and a linux data disk with a tiny dos partition for winblows crap.
the partition table of my linux disk is something like:
hda1: xx mb ext2
hda2: 256 mb swap-turned-fat
hda3: rest of disk, linux /
how can i restore my partition table? i forgot the size of the first partition though. i think it was either
20 or 50 mb, and this is around a 5 gig drive.
i have avoided writing to the new c drive on that disk - since it might get ruined because dos thinks it's in the wrong place.
loadlin didn't work, but i didn't have my full kernel. i'll try to download one off slackware's site today, if i get a chance.