lost partion table on NTFS

I recently had a computer come in that had a CPU upgrade. The machine would not see ANY hard drives and was slow as heck in doing even the post.
It turned out to be a jumper setting, even though the the drives worked fine in the old machine, it neede the jumpers moved from single/master to neutral.
It was running NT 4.0, something I found out after the fact, but that’s another story.
Unknown to me the drive was also NTFS.
I did a fdisk/mbr from a win9x, and you can guess the rest.
No recovery/rescue disks ever made, ect, ect, ect…
any ideas how to get past this little problem?
kev