PC & M$ = fun

A friend recently had real fire at his PC ATX PS(we talked about it here on AO). btw: The Motherboard and processor died in the flames to (power peak) -> cost 220 US $
The shop made still some error while replacing the transfo and MB -> they switched IDE master and slave so the friend phoned to me in panic: my c: files are on the d: drive. (LOL)
Jumpers replaced -> OK

Now this guy phoned again to me: another prob with another PC: the PC was rebooted with a nonbootable disk and after the PC gave the 'replace disk' msg and a restart without the non bootable disk the pc didn't boot anymore -> no primary boot disk anymore. Partitions gone! no C: ! Without altering the BIOS, or using Fdisk, or format or whatsoever just by switching the Win98 box on and of: all the partitions where completly lost. I asked him the trick to do this, LOL.

I tried to get the data on it back with recovery tools -> no succes.
Fdisk -> create primary partition, restart, format c: /s
install Win98 (LOL)

(What would all those ppl out there do without ppl like us? stop insulting them, they give us work.) :)