[Bug-ddrescue] Question about recovering data from a dying hard drive

[Tom Williams]

So, a friend gave me a dying 500GB 2.5" SATA hard drive, with a Mac OS X
HFS+ filesystem on it, to see if I could get the data off.  There are
some family photos they need to recover.  So, I connected the drive to
my Linux system, using my external hard drive enclosure, and used
ddrescue 1.19 to recover what data it could. Throughout the recovery
process, the drive made clicking and various other sounds, so I know the
drive was close to death.  After about almost 9 days, ddrescue stopped
and reported the 'input file disappeared'.  I interpreted that to mean
the dying hard drive finally "gave up the ghost" and ddrescue couldn't
read from it anymore.  This was during pass 2 or reading non-tried blocks.

Anyway, ddrescue reported successfully recovering 133GB of the 500GB of
data.  The file, to which I did the recovery, is 500GB but ddrescue
reported recovering 133GB of it.   After ddrescue stopped running, due
to the "input file" disappearing, I tried to mount the file it created
and failed because no HFS+ superblock could be found by the "mount" command.

My question:  does the fact that the HFS+ superblock not being found by
the "mount" command mean the data file I have is useless and I simply
can't get to the data ddrescue did recover?

Thanks in advance for your time and assistance!

Peace...

Tom

-- 
/When we dance, you have a way with me,
Stay with me... Sway with me.../