Michael,

Odds are mkfs was run on sdc and not sdc1 initially.  Your plan is good, 
backup the data and reconfigure the filesystem as you want, then restore 
the data.  There aren't really any tricks to shuffling the data with dd.

Cheers,
Mark

Michael Hannon wrote:
> 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
>
>   


-- 
Mr. Mark V. Stodola
Digital Systems Engineer

National Electrostatics Corp.
P.O. Box 620310
Middleton, WI 53562-0310 USA
Phone: (608) 831-7600
Fax: (608) 831-9591