Success!
Thanks to those who responded with suggestions. I tried seven programs
before I found one that worked. It was Powerquest's Lost & Found, which
someone kindly sent me. What a great program!! Unfortunately, it seems to be
unavailable now. Maybe there are others that will work, but I stopped
searching once I had success.

Having recovered the precious files, my virus checker (AVG free version,
from www.grisoft.com, highly recommended) detected the good old
CIH/Chernobyl virus, which is what must have caused the problem in the first
place. (It occurred on April 26.) This is a nasty virus that has been around
for a few years but the computer's owner hadn't updated his Norton Antivirus
since buying the computer early in 1998 Had I known or suspected CIH, there
is a little program which is supposed to work on CIH damaged drives. It's
called mrecover and is easy to find on the net.

Here are a couple of links with info about Lost & Found:

http://www.powerquest.com/servlets/PressRelease?ID=136

http://www.powerquest.com/support/primus/id160.html

Kevin Johnson wrote:

> Calling all data recovery experts.....
>
> What are your suggestions to recover data files from a hard drive with
> missing/corrupted partition table, boot sector, FATs and root directory?
>
> The drive still works and the files are probably all there. It's a
> 4.55Gb Quantum Bigfoot with, as far as I know, a single FAT32 partition.
>
> I have tried unsuccessfully to recover the drive with Norton Disk
> Doctor. I can read the data on the drive with Norton Diskedit and
> similar programs. But I can't retrieve any files. DOS and Windows can't
> access the drive at all, and Diskedit just shows five gobbledygook
> filenames in the root directory and no directory entries. I'm dreading
> the huge job of searching out and piecing together files using just a
> sector editor...Ugghh!!
> I've tried three other programs which claim to recover files in these
> sorts of circumstances. None of them worked. There must be a way...What
> is it???
>
> Cheers
> --
> Kevin Johnson
> [log in to unmask]
>
>                The NOSPIN Group Promotions is now offering
>               Mandrake Linux or Red Hat Linux CD sets along
>          with our NOSPIN Power Linux CD...  at a great price!!!
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