drive mounting issue (SCSI on beige G3)

[Benjamin Warfield]

First a little background: I'm trying to recover the data from a dead 
system (processor failure) by putting the drives from it into another 
system, so I can mount them and copy whatever data's worth saving.  
This means that I have two SCSI drives, both with ext3 partitions on 
them, connected up to a G3 minitower (IDE boot drive), which minitower 
(borrowed from a friend) is running YDL 3.0, largely unmodified and 
un-updated (don't worry, it's not on the internet).

Everything seemed to be working fine: I'd gotten everything hooked up, 
booted into linux, and the drives were recognized without apparent 
trouble.  Then I tried to mount them, and got "VFS: can't find ext3 
filesystem on sd(8,5)" (and other similar messages when I tried other 
numbers when I tried the other drive and other partition numbers, in 
case I'd misremembered the partition number).  At the suggestion of my 
roommate, I tried fdisk -l and was told "Disk /dev/sda doesn't contain 
a valid partition table", with the same message for /dev/sdb... and 
also for /dev/hda, which is the boot drive on a system which is very 
obviously booted just fine.  For reference, that's fdisk and mount 
v2.11y.

Anybody care to explain to me what I'm missing on this?  I'm fairly 
sure the disks were not damaged in the death of the old system (it 
seemed like processor failure), and I haven't done anything rash with 
them since then.

Thanks for any help you can offer!

	--Ben Warfield