There are programs that will attempt to discover or "recreate" the header block, if it's been wiped out or altered. Its common use is to recover photos from corrupted memory cards, but they work on those spinning drives too. I managed to mangle a header (partition table), and got it back with just the little bit of sweat that comes with the "Oh crap" moment.
There is another set of programs marketed as "partition recovery tools," that likely have similar facilities.
I have a copy of SystemRescueCD on a CD, a DVD, and a thumb drive (so one or another will boot from most any hardware); the tool on that that does the job is called "testdisk" See http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk for a description of use.
Yeah. I thought about that after I wrote it.
Years ago I worked for a company that used an old IBM 8088 and the software they were running was pretty much ‘dos’ oriented.
I had to copy files from the main computer to an office one by using 3 1/2 inch disks.
I took the disk and ‘formatted’ it before transferring files from the ‘main’ computer to the disk.
Well, as bad luck would have it, I accidently typed ‘format’ while still logged onto the ‘C’ drive. Ooops!
Luckily, I knew enough about the header information that I booted from floppy and used ‘debug’ to go in and correct the ‘pointer’ to the first sector and the ‘80h’ drive indicator.
Still lost the days work, but it was restored from a tape backup.
Needless to say. I never did it that way again.
Tape to Tape was MUCH safer!
:)