If you look into a harddisk from an HP server with smart array configured for raid1, you will recognize that the partition table of this disk has only one partition:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
<device>p3 1 1 8001 12 Compaq diagnostics
The real partitions are invisible? No. I found the start of the real data and the real partition table at block 1088 (*512Byte). 1088 = 17 * 63 ?? Where does this number come from ?
You can get the real disk start with:
dd if=disk bs=512 skip=1088 count=100 of=/tmp/head
If you want to mount a partition from this disk directly, you can do this with losetup:
losetup -f -o $(( ( 1088 + <partition_start_block_from_fdisk> ) * 512 )) disk
mount /dev/loop0 /mnt/target
I don’t know if this number 1088 is correct for all disks but it was correct for all I checked.