[ale] IDE drive partition table problem

[Dow Hurst]

I had a Dell Precision workstation with RH9 on it.  It came with a 
second 80Gb hard drive.  I used that drive to backup a bunch of data.  
Later, I added a 160Gb drive to the machine.  The 80Gb came preformatted 
with an ext3 filesystem.  I let RH9 format the 160Gb drive with ext3.  
The 160Gb drive was used to backup the data on the 80Gb drive.

So, now I have a SuSE9.1 install on a separate generic machine.  I've 
attached both drives to the machine and found that both drives act 
weird, like there is no filesystem on there.  The partition table on 
both drives seems unreadable by fdisk and partd.  What is going on?  I 
would like to access the data on the 80Gb drive.  I've decided already 
to use the 160Gb in a RAID-5 array so that isn't available for testing 
anymore.  It was very strange though.  Partd had to rewrite the 
partition table before it could deal with the drive at all.  I tried 
using ext2.fsck before doing that just in case I could get to a 
superblock but to no avail.  What am I missing here?  How should I 
approach dealing with the 80Gb drive that I'd like to get mounted 
properly and read the data off of?  I can dd the drive but my real 
question is, what kind of magic foofoo dust did RH9 use to put a 
unreadable partition table on the drive so the filesystem can't be 
accessed?  Since it is both drives that came from the same machine, and 
I used both extensively with no problems, I don't think there is a disk 
hardware problem here.  I can put the drive in my machine here at home 
running SuSE9.0 and using a 2.4 kernel similar to RH9 instead of a 2.6 
kernel.  I can run whatever tests and commands are recommended.  Thanks 
for your time,
Dow