I have been requested by a friend to rescue some data from a ntfs drive that failed. I first tried using testdisk and it found the primary mft faulty, I replaced it with the backup and then the drive no longer showed as ntfs. I wasn't happy about this, so I decided to use ddrescue to attempt to get all the data off the drive.
I used gparted to create a new partition on an external usb drive, it didn't have ntfs as an option, so I used fat32, rand ddrescue twice (the second time with -vr2 flags) and the output is garbled. I've read of the need to run ntfs.fsck and of course this would be assuming that the target/output partition were ntfs. So, I have downloaded ntfsprogs (already have ntfs-3g) and will try to create a new partition of ntfs to use as a target. However, since source drive is dying, I prefer to not be pounding on it over and over.
Is there a way to work with the 261 separate files that were created on the fat32 partition? Why did ddrescue create all these separate files rather than an image? The names are garbled special characters. I assume that this is because of the partition being fat32?
I have not read it disclosed clearly that the target partition must be of the same type as the source, yet this does make sense. I went the route of fat32 only because gparted didn't have the option, and now I realize I was missing a necessary package.
Is it possible to work with the data created on the fat32 partition?