problems accessing ms-dos partition

[hpsiegel at zk3.dec.com (Howard Siegel USG)]

I recently purchased a nice, new Maxtor 1.3Gbyte disk to supplement
my old 420Mbyte harddrive.  I won't trouble you with the tragicomedy
of errors that resulted in my accidentally wiping my entire old disk.

I had it completely backed up -- DOS/WIN on one tape, linux / on
another, and my /users area on a third.  But because I neglected to
save a copy of a kernel with compatible ftape module, I had to do a
re-install of my linux 1.2.8 OS.

I'm (mostly) back to normal now, but one persistent problem is bugging
me.  When I boot linux, I get the following message --

---------------------------
[MS-DOS FS Rel. 12,FAT 16,check=n,conv=b,uid=0,gid=0,umask=022]
[me=0xf8,cs=8,#f=2,fs=1,fl=160,ds=321,de=512,data=353,se=0,ts=328032,ls=512]
Transaction block size = 512
VFS: Can't find a valid MSDOS filesystem on dev 0x0301.
---------------------------

-- and I can't mount my /dev/hda1 (which is my ms-dos partition) in
linux to /dos.  I know about "-t msdos" in the mount command usage,
and I'm able to mount floppies from /dev/fd0 (A:) with no problems.
I'm only having difficulties with /dev/hda1 (C:).

I'd welcome suggestions.

Howard Siegel
hpsiegel at zk3.dec.com