[H-GEN] Partition table gone

[Edwards_Ewan_B at cat.com]

The hdd in my work desktop has gone to that great disc drive graveyard 
in the sky.  Interestingly, the box will still start to boot on that 
drive.  It loads the kernel and gets as far as starting to load 
modules before generating all sorts of errors and making lots of 
horrible noises.

I now have a new hdd in the system and have recovered all the 
important data from backup.  Unfortunately, there is/was some other 
stuff on the hdd I'd like to retrieve.  

I've re-started the box with the old hdd installed as the secondary 
IDE master.  The system recognises the drive, but any attempt to 
access it fails because, apparantly, it no longer has a partition 
table.  So, I'm guessing the drive has developed defects in the area 
the partition table is written.  Don't know if there are any other 
defects.

Does anyone know an easy way I can try to read data off this thing?
The stuff I want is not worth a lot of time or effort trying to 
retrieve.
One thought: Is there something like a 'backup' partition table 
written to the disc somewhere that could be used?  If so, how?

If I knew exactly what the partition table looked like, I'd be tempted 
to use fisk to try to re-create it.