title: Trying to identify a filesystem / disk label, recover it
body: <p>I'm trying to ID (and maybe recover) the filesystem/partition table. Friend brought a "broken" USB drive, Windows can't recognise the partition layout.</p>
  
  <p>Under Linux, <code>fdisk</code> says the partition table is empty. Tried mounting it as NTFS, vfat, no luck. With <code>fdisk</code>/<code>mkfs</code>, created an empty: DOS partition table, ntfs and fat filesystems, tried to compare magic numbers in the first block of the respective three and the broken drive - none seem alike. <code>dd</code>'d the first 1MB of the drive to a file on disk (so that <code>file</code> doesn't say it's a block device), <code>file</code> said "data".</p>
  
  <p>This is the first 8 lines of <code>hd</code>:</p>
  
  <pre><code>00000000  0e 21 e9 6e 2c 64 39 b5  63 bf a5 08 8b 07 85 a6  |.!.n,d9.c.......|
  00000010  63 aa ec 58 c3 ff fb 92  64 ec 80 02 f4 3c 4c d1  |c..X....d....&lt;L.|
  00000020  8f 2a e4 58 24 39 ba 3d  86 4a 8e e0 d3 27 ac 60  |.*.X$9.=.J...'.`|
  00000030  eb 81 73 9f 26 68 f6 15  72 60 02 6b 32 32 4c 75  |..s.&amp;h..r`.k22Lu|
  00000040  b1 0a cd ff ff ff f4 ea  23 c8 2a ba 25 01 20 9d  |........#.*.%. .|
  00000050  26 52 b1 31 2c 4d 72 b1  2f bc 9f 1f 59 5b 98 98  |&amp;R.1,Mr./...Y[..|
  00000060  41 9d 3c 10 17 d0 58 9a  ab 24 d9 31 ff 3a 79 55  |A.&lt;...X..$.1.:yU|
  00000070  f3 88 08 6b 57 ec 7a 5f  ff e0 21 c7 87 4c 62 83  |...kW.z_..!..Lb.|
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any idea how to proceed with the recovery?</p>