[cobalt-users] still can't figure out how to recreate /dev/hdb1 and hdb2 is acting oddly

[jale@xxxxxxxxxx]

I have a Raq3i with 2 drives. The 2nd drive is a backup drive that I use dd 
to copy to every few days. I did something, not sure what, that messed up 
the first 2 partitions and /dev entries. I did a full new partitioning on 
it hoping it would solve all the problems, but it did not.  Here are my 
various issues, any help, of course, is greatly appreciated:

1) I lost my entry /dev/hdb1 - which is the 1st partition on my 2nd hard 
drive. Without this entry I can't dd my /dev/hda1 to my backup drive.  I 
can't dd and I obviously can't mount it. The /dev entries has a 'b' in the 
first position of the permissions, not sure what that means (I assume it 
means block-device). I cannot cp another entry to it either.  So I have no 
way right now to backup my primary partition.

2) Also, my /dev/hdb2 has problems. I can do a dd:
dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/dev/hdb2

but when I try to mount it with:
mount /dev/hdb2 /mnt

I get:
mount: you must specify the filesystem type.

So that partition also has some strange problem. I thought re-partitioning 
would solve this one, but it did not.

My /dev/hdb3 and /dev/hdb4 seem to be fine.

I don't mind completely wiping out the backup drive and repartitioning, 
formatting, dd'ing ... but it doesn't seem to solve the problem.

Any ideas on:
1) how do I get my /dev/hdb1 back
2) why I can't mount /dev/hdb2 which *appears* to work, at least on the dd

THANKS!!
Jale