RE: all those dead sectors: by any chance does the drive mechanism have a sticker on it showing where the bad blocks are located? (That was standard procedure with MFM/RLL drives.) I'm guessing another thing that *might* be on the preamble of the disk is a bad block list that instructs the formatter to skip the bad areas; the question there would be if HFS has a mechanism for marking bad blocks on a filesystem level or if it's up to the driver of the storage device to present all the good blocks as a flawless virtual space. That's something that off the top of my head I have absolutely no idea about. If it's the latter piecing the filesystem back together may involve having to stitch two non-contiguous chunks of sectors together.

... also, what's with the "interleave 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16" statement? Does that mean it's detected the interleave and the sectors are in the correct order, or does it mean "unknown" and the sectors might be in any order?