If your boss accidently overwrites the first few megabytes of you harddrive, both the partition table, and the superblock, all is lost. Or is it?
Boot the machine in any way you can, and if it’s not already there, get the tool called ‘testdisk’.
Debian / Ubuntu:
# apt-get install testdisk
Gentoo:
# emerge -av testdisk
testdisk can scan the disk for partition boundaries, so if you can remember some of the layout, it’s proably possible to restore the partition table.
Also it can scan the partitions for possible ext2 superblock backups, and restore them, if the main superblock has gone AWOL.
Just a hint 😉