fdisk "unable to open" /dev/hdb

[neidorff <neidorff gmail com>]

Hi folks,

My wife's hard disk stopped booting, and her backup is corrupt.  (of course)

I took the disk and put it as a slave (/dev/hdb) in a linux
machine.  Booted up.  fdisk reported that it is "unable to
open" the drive.  Now this is weird.  The bios reports that
the drive is there when I power on.  This is a different error
than a missing disk, that error is "unable to read".  Anyone have
any idea what type of failure I have on the disk and how to read it to
recover data?

Many, many thanks,

Mark