I have removed a HDD from a video recorder which is something like 20 years old. It is a standard 3.5 inch IDE drive.

I found that I was not able to read the drive paritions using an IDE disk to USB adapter, and thought the drive was dead. However gparted thinks that the file system is not allocated with any partitioning scheme.

I ran testdisk to try and recover lost paritions. It did not exit successfully, but printed an error message which indicated that the partition scheme was FAT12.

I have no idea why something from the early 2000s is using FAT12, but this might explain why the OS doesn't recognize the disk.

Is there any FAT12 support for Linux?

Currently I am using Debian 10, however if there is any other Linux based OS with FAT12 support, I don't mind running something else in a VM or as a Live boot image.

The vfat driver should automatically detect the FAT type i.e 12, 16 or 32 if it has not been corrupted. It is possible the DVR recorded raw video data to the drive using a proprietary format without any partitioning scheme. Does the DVR still work and does it have a USB or ethernet port? There could be an export function to copy recorded videos to an external drive which I think would decode it to some video format.

What is the output of the command file -s /dev/sdx (where sdx is the device ID for the drive). That should detect if there is a filesystem, MBR or if it is undetected just data.

I think their should be support but it's been a long time since I had anything in Fat12. That being said I routinely mount a FAT16 drive on an old Debian 'Sarge' device.
A lot of early 2000 PDA devices (WinCE) read FAT12 disks. Not much help but perhaps someone else with a better idea will come along.

Edit: and I see that they have - good luck

Not sure if your drive is actually being used correctly.

Better post specs of drive before we get too far. Could be an old ide like mfm or rll.

Not sure if the drive is actually good.

Some of those adapters can be burned out if power comes from wrong source.

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