[Bug-ddrescue] Mounting image with a wasted partition table?

[Mike Garrett]

Greetings all,

I've recently had a hard disk crash with some data that I'm trying desperately 
to retrieve.  Photorec has pulled some of the photos that I need from it, but 
not many (though it did pull about 19000 useless jpgs from temp files on the 
windows partition. Lol).  Photorec pauses about half-way through the disk and 
then never finds any more pictures.  No OS will assign a drive letter or see 
the partitions, and testdisk doesn't see a partition table, it has to do a 
"quick search" of the cylinders on the drive to find the partition table, which 
it does successfully.

I tried (foolishly, I know) to write the partition table to the drive, and it 
said it wrote it, but it didn't change any of my symptoms.

That said, what I'd like to do is us ddrescue to create an image of the problem 
drive.  If the partition table, etc., is corrupt, I'm not sure if I'll be able 
to mount the image in linux to do much with the image, will I?  Even if this 
info is missing, can I still mount the image well enough to Testdisk it, fix 
the partition table, then try to see the third partition with a (hopefully) 
intact file system?

Thanks for your time!

Mike G.