[mdlug] Some odd experience recovering NTFS drive

[David McMillan]

	My little sister has a laptop running XP Home (I know, I know, but she 
*had* to have it for software her classes required), and the hard drive 
started making odd noises (rattling noise, like the heads never stopped 
seeking) a while back, accompanied by BSODs and eventually "No Boot OS 
found" from the BIOS.

	So, figure, no problem, I'll just boot it from a LiveCD, run some 
utils, clone the drive to a new drive I picked up, done.

	Except... Ubuntu couldn't even see that the drive existed.  Uh oh.

	Step 2:  remove drive, place in external USB enclosure, plug into my 
regular Linux desktop.  Parted says that /dev/sdc has one NTFS partition 
on it taking up the full drive, but mount says that /dev/sdc1 doesn't 
exist.  Huh?

	Step 3:  Run testdisk on it.  Testdisk says the drive is fine, the MBR 
is fine, the backup MBR is fine, and rebuilding the MBR creates an MBR 
identical to what's already there.  But I still can't mount the 
partition and get anything off of it.  WTF?

	Step 4:  make sure all my NTFS utils are up to date.  They are.  Heck.
	Step 5:  consider buying a goat and some black candles.

	Step 6:  decide to try dd instead, copy the drive entire to an image. 
dd stalls at around 20% of the drive -- doesn't fail, just... stops 
progressing.

	Step 7:  use ddrescue.  This is where things get REALLY odd.  At this 
point, despite the fact that the drive is making noises like a pinball 
machine rolling down a hill, ddrescue is still chuntering along.  After 
72hrs, it's retrieved about 14GB out of the 40GB drive, and is still 
chewing away.  There's only been about 4kb worth of errors (let's hear 
it for -v).

	So... anyone ever see anything like this before?  In my past 
experience, a drive this noisy just dies and can't be recovered.  Short 
of that, I've never been unable to at least recover whatever's on the 
good sectors with dd and/or testdisk.  And I've never seen dd or 
ddrescue behave this way before.  The symptoms just don't add up into a 
pattern that makes any sense to me.