Amazing tricks you can do with your IDE interface

[bill at horne.net (Bill Horne)]

OK, this is one for the record books. If you can explain it, please 
call me. 

Scenario: a client with a fried Maxtor disk, which is identifying as 
"N40P" during boot - a sure sign of system area failure. The BIOS says 
it's on the IDE Primary Master.

The BIOS also identifies a WDC<mumble> on the Secondary Master - a Jazz 
drive which is undamaged.

Now, the mystery:

I boot Knoppix from CD, and the system auto-constructs the fstab file, 
which shows /dev/hdc1 and /dev/hdc5. I understand /dev/hdc5, (assuming 
jazz drives have the same format as Zip disks), but /dev/hdc1 has me 
_very_ confused.

I try to mount /dev/hda[1-4], and each errors out on seek and/or read 
errors. Sure enough, the Maxtor is fried. 

However, I _AM_ able to mount _BOTH_ /dev/hdc1 and /dev/hdc5, and I
can transfer data from /dev/hdc1 to the new, shrink-wrapped jazz disk
mounted as /dev/hdc5. Moreover, the client recognizes the data I'm 
able to move!

So, the question is: what/where is /dev/hdc1? There's only one hard
drive in the machine, and I've verified that it's connected as the 
Primary Master IDE device.

All opinions welcome, on or off list. TIA.

Bill Horne
781 784-7287