Geoff Lane wrote:

I recently naively thought I could remove the HD from my Philips DVD
Hard Drive recorder, copy the data over to my computer and then free up
some space.

On connecting it to my Linux machine the partition editor (gparted)
showed it as an unformatted drive.

Does anyone know if there is any way I can read this data and/or copy it
over.

Just a guess, but it might have a file system using the whole disk
(with no need of a partition table). You could try mounting the
same device name you tried to examine with gparted. E.g. if it
was /dev/hdb then:

sudo mount /dev/hdb /mnt

--
Geoff Clare