Xandros lost partitions

[Bob]

Xandros seems to have gotten confused as to the location of several
partitions. I can no longer access most of my hd when booted to it. I
have DOS, 2 different OS/2 and Xandros version 3 in LILO.  All of these
share a couple of partitions and when booted to anything but Linux I
have free access to the partitions.

I had a working system until I tried to burn a CD as user. I received an
informational message that the CD burning software wasn't installed. I
located CDRAO? CDARO? and tried to install it. It said that it was
already installed. I thought I'd uninstall then reinstall it rather then
try to track down where it wasn't configured correctly. This did not
help. I then thought I'd try as root. The burn failed the same way so I
uninstalled then reinstalled. Still no luck with burning a CD. However
when I logged on as user Xandros wouldn't start. Logging on as root
resulted in the same problems.

Whenever I boot to Xandros graphical interface the Xandros splash screen
comes up then the monitor goes black except for a blinking cursor in the
upper left corner.
If I boot to the command line as root I can access /root. I can see and
access some of the directory off of /root.
During boot up I can see that I get a couple of error messages. (After
several reboots I could actually make out some things as they flashed
by.) The two are: "Can't find fstab" and "can't find mtab. "
mtab does not exist anywhere I can find it.
fstab is completely hosed. I deleted it and made a new copy of a back up
I have. It gets overwritten back to the hosed version by some other
program at boot up.
I ran parted and got : Error: no device found
parted /hda results in Error:could not stat device /hda no such file or
directory. /hdb gives the same error message. Opps I guess is should let
you know that hda is DOS/OS/2 partitions and /hdb is the Linux stuff
(mostly.)
fdisk reports that it is unable to open the hd's as well.
fdisk -l doesn't give any message at all.

I ran e2fsck and it reported that the superblock was corrupt and that I
should try to restore from another copy. I could not locate another copy
to try and restore from by running mke2fs -nb.

Does anyone not confused by all this have any ideas to regain access to
the missing partitions? If I can supply any other info I will give you
what I can. Long error messages are likely to be abridged as I have to
reboot to Os/2 to get net access and I can't  save to any removable or
accessible partitions from Xandros. Standard stupid quote coming. I only
need to retrieve a couple of things and I can do a complete reinstall if
need be. But I would really like not to lose these files. I was trying
to back them up when all of this started. Honest!
 Actually I have this Saturday off so I could bring this silly thing to
Tempe if that would be better then email.

Bob