PS4 saves gone

So a buddy of mine had a problem with his PS4, and had to send it in for warranty repair. Prior to sending it he was on the line with their normal tech support people who nonchalantly mentioned that, when he sent it in, he'd lose all his files (e.g. months and months worth of saves), which he thought was crazy. He was informed that if he didn't want his saves to be deleted, he'd have to take the harddrive out. No problem - he's handy with a screwdriver, took it out, sent it in for repair. It showed back up at his house faster than expected, and he popped his drive back in...no workie.

Well, turns out that Sony does some weird shit with disks newly inserted - doesn't recognize them at the least, and very well may automatically format them.

All the instructions online indicated he needed to do a software re-initialization which would clearly reformat the system.

This is months and months of gameplay he'd lose! All because he didn't want, in principle, to be forced to pay for that damn cloud service PS+ or whatever, which I totally get. 

Anyway now I've got the drive and I'm working to figure out if his saves can be recovered somehow..which I'd be surprised if they can't. However there are lots of problems:

1. The PS4 drive is in a format and/or partitioned in a way that isn't easily mountable - can't mount it in any way in Windows (tried Win7 Pro and Server 2012r2), Mac OSX just quietly giggles at the silliness of doing something so technical, and as it turns out the filesystem may be in exfat, which Linux doesn't particularly like.

2. The partition scheme of the damned disk is nutso - 15 partitions

3. It seems that the game saves are also encrypted. I'm hoping they're encrypted against a public key available from the user's account, so simply moving the encrypted files and their keyfiles to a working system with the same user logged in will just work. However the research I've done online is not encouraging on this topic.

So, I don't have a modern system that has a Linux distro running on it (have an old Thinkpad running an old version of Mint, but I only use that for watching DVDs on my equally-old projector, ha). 

I'm installing Lubuntu 14.04 in a Hyper-V virtual machine on my Server 2012R2 host, passing through the USB cradle that the PS4 harddrive is enclosed in, and going to try to mount the correct partition, find the files, pull them off into a Fat32-formatted USB drive with the right filestructure to re-import, take the drive back to my friend's place to reformat and reinstall it in his PS4, and hopefully re-import the saves into his PS4....

Lots and lots of if's here...wish me luck (: