[ale] Rescuing an OS X HD from Linux - partition table hosed

[JK]

Hi folks,

Need a clue, if any are available:

My ex-wife's Mac Mini refuses to boot.  When powered on, it goes to the
gray Apple/spinny-gear screen for about 10 minutes, then powers down.
Assuming some horrid hardware issue, I opened the machine up and pulled
the 40GB HD so as to rescue her files. I popped it into a Linux box,
which sees the drive just fine.

Problem: fdisk says there are no partitions on the disk.  It sees the
disk capacity correctly, but claims the partition table is empty.

Googling "default OS X 40GB partition table" and many variations thereof
has netted me nothing.  I am pretty sure that partitioning the entire
drive as one big partition is not correct, based on previous (but long-ago)
looks at Mac partition tables.

Any ideas how I should partition this puppy so as to pull off whatever
data might still be there?

Thanks in advance,

-- JK


-- 
As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations
it is incapable of solving approaches zero. -- V, Order of the Stick