Greetings.  This is slightly off-topic, but I hope it's of sufficient
interest to warrant posting here.

We've got a computer here that's running Fedora 8, i386.  The machine
has two external drives, both mounted to an eSATA controller (Silicon
Image, Inc. SiI 3114 SATARaid Controller).

The disks are 750GB and 500GB, respectively, in size.

Everything seems to work as expected, except that the 750GB drive is
somehow getting mounted on the device, rather than on a partition:

    /dev/sdc              688G  554G  100G  85% /local3

There IS a partition on the drive:

    # fdisk -l /dev/sdc

    Disk /dev/sdc: 750.1 GB, 750156374016 bytes
    255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders
    Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
    Disk identifier: 0x3e863a4f

       Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
    /dev/sdc1               1       91201   732572001   83  Linux


But my attempt to mount the drive on sdc1 results in:

    # mount -t ext3 /dev/sdc1 /local3
    mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc1,
           missing codepage or helper program, or other error
           In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
           dmesg | tail  or so

I don't really understand what's going on here or how the system got
into this peculiar configuration.

I'm inclined to back up the data from the mounted /local3, then
re-create the partition, then re-initialize the file system on sdc1,
then restore the data.

But I was wondering if there might be some way to short-circuit that
process, maybe by using dd to copy some information from /dev/sdc to
/dev/sdc1.  Is this possible?  If so, is it risky?  Is there a better
approach?

Thanks.

-- Mike

-- 
Michael Hannon            mailto:[log in to unmask]
Dept. of Physics          530.752.4966
University of California  530.752.4717 FAX
Davis, CA 95616-8677