Sector 0 error and no partitions.... can I save recordings?

[tclarkmd]

First off, thanks to all those who have posted to these threads in the past. I've learned much in the past few days, but I'm still stuck. Here is my problem. I have a Hughes HDVR2, DirectTivo series 2 unit.
Last fall, I added a 160GB B drive to the original Maxtor 40G A drive.
Everything was great until a couple of days ago, when I got the grey screen of death saying "please wait. powering up..."
I pulled the drives and put them in my PC and booted up to MFS Tools 2.0.
MFS Tools when through it's usual inital diagnostic check, and sure enough, the A drive (40GB original) reported a Input/output error and no partition table information:

end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda), sector 0
unable to read partition table

I was able to dd the original drive A with bad sector 0 over to another drive using

dd conv=noerror,sync if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=1024k

with a response of

dd: reading '/dev/hda': Input/output error

but the copying continued for 8 hours and finally returned the appropriate (40GB) and equal number of blocks in and out
maybe it worked... so next step: expand and marry with mfsadd (/dev/hdc /dev/hdb), to which I got

/dev/hdc10:success
mfs_load_volume_header: mfsvol_read_data: Input/output error
Unable to open MFS drives

What was successful? Sector 0 still seems to be out of commission...
Should I try using MTB on this new drive to fix Sector 0?
When I try MTB on the old A drive, it just hangs....
Am I better off skipping MTB and just restoring a backup image to a new drive (and use -p option to preserve as much similarity between the old A drive and the new restored drive) and then dd the recordings to the new drive?

Thanks, again, to all who are out there.

[tclarkmd]

Correction on the above. When I used MTB on the old A drive, it didn't hang (just took ALOT longer than I thought it would for just 512 bytes). But it also didn't fix the problem... still got the I/O error and no partitions looking at hda on mfstools disk boot up.
Of note, when I dd_rescued drive A to new drive using

dd_rescue -v -b 1024 /dev/hda /dev/hdc

I got only a single error, and it was the first block, and it was noted to have size of 1023.
Since this is 1023 and not 512, should I assume it is beyond scope of MTB to fix?
Will pdisk help here?

[classicsat]

I think you may have to manually reconstruct the partition table. MTB will create the boot sector. You will need to know the details of the partition structure.

[tclarkmd]

Seems logical that I need to rebuild the partition table across both drives. Any tips on where to get started with that daunting task? I know pdisk is out there, but I haven't found much on how it really works. And I don't know if it will just wipe the existing data (ie. recordings) out when it executes.