Lost Partition

I have a problem with a disappearing partition on my hard drive.On my
Compaq Presario there was a partition on the hard drive (4.2GB) that was
used for saving a backup of the hard drive. The program used was
Power Quest Drive Image which was factory pre-installed. There is also
a restore disk to do a full restore of the system as it came from the factory.
I had to do a full restore which went okay but the backup to the partition
was incomplete and the files looked badly corrupted. I could not remove
those files so I formatted the partition. I got rid of the files but the process
created the drive letter, (E; which was the original and an extra drive (F
which did not exist before. I cannot access either one as the following
message comes up: “E:\is not accessable. A device attached to the system is not functioning.” Both drives are empty. I do not need to recover the files as they
were corrupted anyway. I just want to find a way to get back the partition [E:].
Could someone give me instructions how I could recover the partition without
damaging any files on the main partition of the hard drive.

My computer is:
Compaq Presario 5827
500 mhz processor
256mb RAM
17GB hard drive #1
6GB hard drive #2