Spinrite.

[Tim Chase]

On December 30, 2013, Anders Holmberg wrote:
> I will give grml a try as the ntfs partition on my western digital
> elements usb drive has gone south.

That stinks.  What sorts of files were lost?  There are some
filetype-specific recovery utilities that can scour the drive.  I
don't know whether NTFS throws any additional wrinkles into the
equation (particularly if you had an encrypted NTFS partition) but
you can try using something like

fgrep --binary-files=text -C 2000 "string in file" /dev/sda2 >
recovered_data.out 

which would search the hard-drive image for some fixed string that
you know is in the file, and writes the dumped data to
recovered_data.out   It might not be perfect, but depending on the
filetype of the data you're hunting for, it can make a fair shot at
recovering things.  I've used that to successfully recover text,
HTML, Markdown, XML, and the like.

If they're JPEG images, I've used the "recoverjpeg" utility to
recover images with amazing ability.

-tim