[CLUE-Tech] can't mount hdd under knoppix

[Dave Price]

I have installed knoppix from cd to a hard drive.

There is another drive in the system with a single ext2 partition on it
that has (valuable) data on it.

Knoppix reports device errors when i try to mount the drive, but I can
mount it when I boot another distros rescue cd.

Under a Mandrake 9 rescue cd, esfsck -f reports no errors and the drive
mounts.

Knoppix says:

root at dp:/home/davep# mount -t ext2 /dev/hdb1 /local
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb1,
       or too many mounted file systems
root at dp:/home/davep#


or:

root at dp:/home/davep# e2fsck /dev/hdb1
e2fsck 1.27 (8-Mar-2002)
e2fsck: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read
while trying to open /dev/hdb1
Could this be a zero-length partition?
root at dp:/home/davep#

And dmesg has this repeated in it:

hdb: read_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error
hdb: read_intr: error=0x10 { SectorIdNotFound }, LBAsect=256902992,
sector=0

Any suggestions as to how to deal with this? (Would it be dangerous at
this point to use tune2fs -j under the rescue CD?

aloha,
dave