Spinrite.

[Jason White]

Anders Holmberg  <blinux-list at redhat.com> wrote:
>I will give grml a try as the ntfs partition on my western digital elements usb drive has gone south.
>I can't get it back with testdisk so maybe some  other tools might work.

It seems that Linux has a limited ability to repair corrupted ntfs file systems
with the ntfsfix utility, but I would suggest trying other methods first, as
a repair tool may only make the problem worse.

If you think the drive might be failing (and smartctl should give an
indication of this), some people recommend making a full copy using dd, then
trying to recover the files from the copy rather than from the original. I've
never had to do this, but instructions should be easy to find on the Web if
you have a spare drive to which you can copy everything before trying to
recover it. If I remember rightly, you can copy to an image file on a larger
drive rather than directly to another drive, then mount the image file.

If the disk really has failed, your only option then is to invest in sending
it to a company that does hardware-based recovery, with no guarantee of useful
results.