Er, aren't you guys forgetting something? You have the slice number, but not the partition letter (at least that I can see). Like /dev/ad3s2i, etc... An extended DOS partition means that there are several logical paritions contained within a primary partition, in my experience. You can only have 4 primary partitions, but you can have many logical partitions nested inside them. Just keep trying letters (a, b, c, d, e...) until you find it. Also, I *think* the slice numbers correspond with primary partitions, but I could be wrong.

will do that, but should fdisk not show the different partitions inside the slice ? (freebsd terms)

if this is really the pain in rthes ass it seems to be I am really considering just buying a new HDs formating that as freebsd mount the old HDs inside a friends linux and samba the files over *sigh*