[Bug-ddrescue] help needed recovering a hard drive with bad blocks

[gr]

Hello,

I have a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (120 GB) that seems
to have developed some bad sectors.  I cannot access
this drive from Windows XP (the log shows that it has
bad blocks); however the BIOS recognizes the drive
correctly.

After a little research, I tried connecting the drive
directly to a working system and booted up Knoppix. 
The 'smartctl' command says that there have been 61
Reallocated Sectors and 2 Offline Uucorrectable
Sectors (e.g. 'UNC @ LBA 0x00000056 = 86', etc.). 
Since the drive was in a USB external case, I was
unaware of any warning signs from SMART.

I would like to recover as much data as possible, but
since I'm afraid that the bad sectors have affected
the NTFS file system, I'm not sure how I can mount the
drive after using using ddrescue to image the bad
drive onto a new drive.

Here is my plan:

1.  Format new drive using 'dd if=/dev/zero
of=/dev/newdrive'

2.  Use ddrescue to make image as fast as possible:
ddrescue -B -n /dev/baddrive /dev/newdrive
/media/usbflashdrive/logfile

3.  Try to mount /dev/newdrive ???
4.  If I it cannot be mounted, use PhotoRec to recover
files ???

Would this work?

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com