Restoring MBR - Solved

[bill at horne.net (Bill Horne)]

My thanks to Jerry for his suggestions. Here's what I did:

1. I used Tom's Root/Boot floppy to get Linux running on the machine: 
http://www.toms.net/rb/
2. I used gpart to guess and reset the partition table values: 
http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/
3. I used Partition Magic 5.0 to repair various file-system length 
discrepancies, such as CHS vs LBA differences.

Lessons Learned:

1. If you download the online version of Partition Magic and don't pay 
for the CD, you should write the install key on the CD-R you use to back 
up the online version. ;-J
2. The only way to find out if your recovery plan is valid is to trash 
your partition table.
  A. Norton Ghost, Partition Magic, and Ghod knows what other repair 
utilities choke and die when faced with a corrupt MBR.
  B. Having Ghost backups "safely" stored on both your wintel box and 
your Samba server does you no good if you don't have the correct driver 
for your wintel box's NIC available when you need it. Luckily, I didn't. 
Won't happen again!
3. Backups at one-month intervals don't cut it. From now on, weekly at a 
minimum. Suggestions for automating the process are welcome.

FWIW.

Bill Horne