My Dell latitude crashed(mainboard death) awhile back and I am now on a mac iBookG4 and happy with it, but I need to get data from the old mandrake 9.2 disk from the dell. I have the drive housed in a USB 2.0 enclosure and have tried to read it with the mac and with a friend's XP machine. Mac says it's unreadable, XP can see the disk(sees MBR and 3 partitions) but I can't get to the data.

So, now I am trying to get at it via RAM loaded gentoo off the gentoo livecd. It sees the drive when I plug it in and says that this SCSI drive will be sda. So

#mkdir /mnt/usb
#mount /dev/sda /mnt/usb
#cd /mnt/usb
#ls

gives the expected contents including root, home, bin,boot,tmp, etc, etc. If this were the contents of the attached disk I should be able to

#cd home

and see /jet at least which is where the stuff I want is, but /home is empty.

Is there something else I should be doing or is the drive unreadable

since no one has attempted I found via fdisk that the partition I wanted was sda6 and that allows me to see the stuff I need. In case anyone else has a similar issue.