Recover data from an ''unpartitioned'' hard drive

Posted by Rafael S. Calsaverini on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Rafael S. Calsaverini
Published on 2009-11-12T17:10:26Z Indexed on 2010/03/17 8:11 UTC
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hard-drive

I'm trying to recover data from a hdd for a friend from work. He was using it on an old win98 PC (so I guess it was a FAT 16 filesystem). When he installed the drive on a new PC his Windows XP can't recognize the filesystem and give an error message saying that the drive is unformatted.

I tried to mount the hdd under linux but no partitions appear to be associated with the drive (I have only /dev/sdb associated with that drive and no /dev/sdb1 or sdb2 etc).

I've found many articles on the web on how to recover partitions (with scripts like dd and ddrescue) but how do I make it when I have no partitions and the system say my drive is unpartioned?

Is it possible to create a new partition without loosing the data?

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