PE> Short story is my system is fucked.

Definitely has to be user error, you aint supposed to fuck your
puter, you are supposed to fuck your wife. Dont you know nuffin ?

PE> OS/2 3.0 has an internal error, and I was unable to get past it.

You havent said if thats the old or the new system, motherboard etc.
Tho you do appear to be saying that this is all after the change.

PE> OS/2 2.1 does not have the error, and I am running with it.

PE> In the process, my entire E drive (2 gig) has been completely emptied.
PE> My D drive (which is on the same physical hard disk) is still intact.
PE> If I enable LBA support, my D drive does not appear on boot manager.
PE> If I disable LBA support, it does.  My D drive is HPFS, like my E drive.

PE> I have done a chkdsk on the E drive, and also, whilst the trapping
PE> was happening, I attempted to install on the E drive (OS/2 3.0), but I
PE> didn't succeed, got some stupid error about a 33 meg file or something.

PE> When I actually had a look at the drive, I noticed there was just
PE> one file, ACLIST or something, anyway, it looked like that thing
PE> I've heard about with HPFS386/Lan, so I tried HPFS386, no use,
PE> I've tried every single thing, but I suspect the data is still there.

Dunno, OS/2 can in some circumstances just mindlessly trash every
file you have if you chkdsk a drive its having problems with.

PE> How do I get it back?

Sounds rather like you may well have gone into thrash
around mode and that drive is gone for good data wise.

PE> I am running the BBS manually now, as my cmd file was something that
PE> I didn't back up unfortunately.  There has been no loss of point mail,
PE> that is all on the C drive, and anyway, I sent all the outgoing stuff
PE> before doing the upgrade.  Damn, if it had been the D drive that had gotten
PE> trashed, I would have had a fairly recent backup, ie my old IDE drive.

PE> Anyway, I have serious suspicions about this LBA.

You should have tried just disabling that on the first hint of a problem
with E once you installed the new motherboard, if thats what you did.

PE> The fact that it doesn't show up in boot manager is worrying.

It is indeed, thats what I said before, that enabling it may make
the data invisible. In this case that applys to the partition table.

Its not clear what you actually did. If you installed the new
motherboard, and auto identified the 2.5GB drive, hopefully you
did get the same numbers as you used with the old motherboard.

That should have then allowed both the D and E drives to be as
visible as they were on the old system. Maybe needing to disable LBA.

PE> But if anyone has a tool to recover data from an HPFS partition
PE> that is in god-knows what state, please send it to me.

Sounds like what you have done with it since has creamed it.
@EOT:

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