DD an old 386 HD and me

Took it upon myself to rescue some data off an old 386 HD this weekend, however, only to find the drive's MBR record missing. Therefore, mount will not recognize the FAT16 formating of said drive. Mistaking the drive for another during an operating system install the MBR was overwritten, yet the data wasn't formated. After a quick "$ cat /dev/hdb ", all ascii data becomes readable on stdout - know that it is still intact. Anyone in the community have a similar experience on recovering data despite a missing MBR?

Oh, I only need the ascii data from the drive - only poetry is being recovered.