Cannot mount image of NTFS partition recovered through ddrescue

Cannot mount image of NTFS partition recovered through ddrescue

The hard drive on my laptop has been giving me read errors, so I decided to back up the data on it.

I decided to use ddrescue to recover the data on the main NTFS partition. I first created a partition of a size slightly greater than the one I wanted to recover (about one or two Gb greater). After more than two days of non-stop copying with around 400 read error messages, ddrescue had finished.

When I tried to mount the partition however, I read

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error

I checked dmesg as was advised but could not find anything pertaining to the device besides the point where it was plugged in, only audit messages.

I then ran ntfsfix, with output:

FAILED
Attempting to correct errors... NTFS signature is missing.
FAILED
Failed to startup volume: Invalid argument
NTFS signature is missing.
Trying the alternate boot sector
Unrecoverable error
Volume is corrupt. You should run chkdsk.

I then attempted to run chkdsk on the partition. The output was as follows:

The type of the filesystem is RAW.
CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.

I thought this would mean the partition is not formatted, which would be odd since the partition it was copied from was. To investigate this, I used cmp on both the device descriptor of the original partition and of the copy, and found they differed in the first byte.

My question is, what should I do to recover the data from my hard drive?

  1. Is there a specific operation I should do on the recovered image?
  2. Should I try to use ddrescue to recover the partition again, or even the whole drive?

And additionally, I would be interested in insight into what caused this issue in the first place.

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