I did not realize I can limit ddrescue to work on "size" of data.
I have successfully rescued ntfs file, however I am unable to resize the resulting partition - from about 450GB to 250GB.
I am using gpartted, the partition is unmounted and it will not resize.

I can run ddrescue again with 'size" option but was wondering if I could use "fsck" to shrink the partition.

ddresuce takes over an hour to work on 250 GB

After RTFM I do not see how or if I can option fsck to shrink the partition.

fsck is only a filesystem checking utility.

Using gparted is the correct way to resize a NTFS partition but you also need to install the ntfsprogs package which contains the ntfsresize utiility.


Read the tips on shrinking a NTFS partition. Reasons for not being able to shrink NTFS are sometimes due to fragmentation or the paging file (A.K.A swap) that might be taking up space in a location >250GB.

https://gparted.org/display-doc.php?...tition-actions

I do have the ntfs utility installed.
I have deleted the partition and rebuilding it using ddrescue with --size option.
Will know in few minutes if it worked.

Could it be a ntfs partition that was in hibernate?

Any errors reported? " the partition is unmounted and it will not resize"

I tend to use testdisk/photorec to recover files.

No error, just the GUI won't "activate" the resize button.
So far I have not achieved 100% results using ddrescue (CLI).
After using "size" I can increase the size , which is obvious when it let me to resize at all.
I tried "plain" copy and got all kind of "cannot do" errors.
Gparted does not show usual yellow usage of the partition, nor any data on "used / unused ".
I can access the contents , no problem.

Actually I feel I made a logical error - if I do not use "size" ddrescue "copies" entire partition , both data and "empty space" . So the result cannot be downsized, which was I was truing to do.