Drive recovery using Linux??

[Bart Silverstrim]

Question about recovery of data.

I have at my disposal a bootable RIP disk and Ubuntu disk (and Ubuntu 
system for researching and making CD's :-) ).

I'm trying to recover data from a panasonic DVR device that captured 
video to a 20 gig hard disk.  The device "died", and swapping out the 
drive seemed to get it working, but they need the video off the drive if 
at all possible.

I put the drive into a system where I could boot RIP Linux.  It saw the 
drive as /dev/hda, so the disk apparently spins up and the electronics 
seem okay.

I did a p in fdisk, and fdisk reported that there wasn't a partition 
table so it didn't know what the filesystem was. Apparently by extension 
there wouldn't be a hda1 to mount.

I mounted a network share and am performing a dd if=/dev/hda 
of=/mnt/share/filename.img, which seems to be working without error so far.

A) I'm hoping to try to pull information off the img file so I don't 
accidentally damage the drive itself.  Is there a way to mount it or 
root through it for potential data to be pulled out?

B) Any ideas or tips on doing recovery of the disk to restore the data 
on it?  Do Panasonic DVR's use a raw partition of some kind, like (as I 
understand it) Oracle databases do?

I'd appreciate any tips or ideas in my hunt for drive recovery methods. 
   In my experiences Linux has had some of the best available for people 
who don't have access to clean rooms and equipment that cost more than 
my house...