[Bug-ddrescue] Correct usage of ddrescue options?

[James W. Watts]

Hello,

I sent a post last week asking for help rescuing my friend's dead XP NTFS hard 
drive via ddrescue
on Knoppix. I'm still working on it. Wanted to ask about ddrescue's options. 
Specifically, here is
the command I issue in Knoppix. I'm writing the image onto a freshly DBAN'ed 
and NTFS-partitioned
hard drive with plenty of space to hold the complete image of the damaged drive.

sudo ddrescue --max-retries=3 --verbose /damaged_drive /rescue_drive/rescue.img
/rescue_drive/rescue_log.txt

These options have produced several workable images for me in the past. And 
even this time, I'm
getting a successful read (with no errors) of the damaged drive -- all 80GB of 
it. But maybe this
command needs revision. What command options do you use? Anything more strict? 
Please examine this
command and let me know what you think.

Last week, Antonio suggested that the filesystem could be damaged. And Jason 
suggested using The
Sleuthkit (TSK) for potential diagnosis/recovery. I downloaded TSK and read 
through the
documentation. But I did not see which tools could locate and/or repair a 
damaged NTFS partition.

How can you fix a damaged NTFS partition when you're working with an image file?

Thank you,

James