determining patrtitions on hard drive

[Patrick Stoddard]

Hi.

I'm to help a friend by long-distance e-mail fix a problem on his Linux
system.  He had reloaded Red Hat 6.1 on a Pentium system with a 2Gb
and 8Gb IDE drive, used only the 2Gb drive since he didn't want to
overwrite the 8Gb drive (where data and other files were stored).  Now
when he boots his system the messages - also seen in dmesg - look like
this:

<snip>
hda: QUANTUM Pioneer SG 2.1A, ATA disk drive
hdb: Maxtor 90845D4, ATA disk drive
hdd: ATAPI CD-ROM V1.3, ATAPI CDROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: QUANTUM Pioneer SG 2.1A, 2014MB w/ 40kB Cache, CHS=1023/64/63
hdb: Maxtor 90845D4, 8063MB w/512kB Cache, CHS=16383/16/63
hdd: ATAPI 2X CD-ROM drive, 120kB Cache
<snip>
Partition check:
hda: hda1 hda2 <hda5>
hdb: unknown partition table
<snipped the rest>

From this snippet, it looks like the bootup process sees both hard 
drives and the CD-ROM drive, but cannot determine the partitions on 
the 8Gb (hdb) drive.  Is there any program or tool that can figure
that out, so the partition(s) on that drive could be mounted and
accessed, or does this mean the drive's previous partition(s) is/are
toast and should be repartitioned and reformatted?

I suggested that he try to assume one partition (hdb1) on there,
and try to mount just that but when he tried this:

mount /dev/hdb1 -t ext2 /dat

he received this:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb1,
or too many mounted file systems
(aren't you trying to mount an extended partition inside?)

That warning can cover almost anything short of the drive having
a complete meltdown.

Suggestions?


TIA!    Patrick


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