[Bug-ddrescue] how big should my MBR rescue be?

[Ian Simmons]

Hi, I hope this is the right way to get help with this. I read in the
bug-ddrescue archives that it is a mistake to use /dev/sdh1 when
rescueing with ddrescue. The email stated that this will not rescue the
MBR so the command ddrescue "/dev/sdh /media/windows/ MBRrescue.img
MBRbackup.log" should also be ran so as to rescue the MBR. This is
assuming the first partition starts at sector 63.

Here is the url for the email I'm refering to.
http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg00082.html
It tells how to put both images back onto another drive.

The problem is that for some reason the first partition which is the
active windows partition starts at  133677. I ran it anyway and rescued
1332 MB. Is it safe to assume that the MBR is in there somewhere?

I plan on installing a fresh copy of Windows to the drive which has a
invalid ntfs, and all I'm trying to do is rescue files. When the rescue
of /dev/sdh1 is finished will it be possible to mount the backup.img and
just copy the files out of it or will I need to use ddrescue to restore
the image to a drive?

Also, I am using ddrescue because I read that it works faster by doing
what dd_rhelp and dd_rescue accomplish by getting the good sectors
first. It is working at the same slow pace of 130kb per second as
dd_recue did. It has been running over 24 hours to rescue only 4 Gigs
and reports not one bad sector so far. Is this normal?

This is my first time using any program like this so I'm sorry to be
such a noob but thank you very much for your time and effort to help
people with this application. 

Sincerely,

Ian Simmons