Liam,
Did you try putting fdisk on a bootable floppy to see what the partitions look like?
If you think the partitions were deleted, you can use:
Active@ Partition Recovery
It is one of the programs I always carry with my of tech calls.
Another option would be to pull the drive from the machine and put it on a WinXP Machine so that though WinXP, you can take a look at the drive to see if you can access the partitions there.
Take Care,
Richard