[robespierre]

Just one tip: when you use dd with the cooked device and bs=512, it's going to be very slow.
The correct way to do this is with the raw device and a larger blocking size, such as bs=16k, depending on how much buffer capacity your adapters can manage. SCSI disks usually have large buffers and can do transfers of 64k and larger without any issue, but the same cannot necessarily be said for dodgy adapters.

I'm surprised that fdisk recognized the MIPS partition map.