[mdlug] Some odd experience recovering NTFS drive

[Raymond McLaughlin]

David McMillan wrote:
> 	Thanks to everyone for their feedback, but I think it's *really* toast 
> now.  It had hit about 60% on the ddrescue run when suddenly the drive 
> (which was sitting on the desk next to me) *jumped* about an inch and 
> started *shrieking*.  I guess the platter bearing went from "rattling" 
> to "seized" and all that inertia dumped into the frame.
> 	Fortunately there isn't anything terribly critical on the drive to 
> recover, but I was hoping to be able to clone it off before it died. 
> Now I'll have to dig up an XP install disk for it....

Actually, if dd or ddrescue was able to copy 60% of the image to an
image file, then it is worth the effort to try mounting this image file
as a loop back device:
    # mount -t ntfs-3g -o loop ddout.img mnt

The table of contents and Master File Table are at the start of the
volume, so you might be able to recover some, or even most, of the files
that were on the drive, depending on how full and how fragmented it was.

Seem worth a try.

Raymond McLaughlin