running ddrescue to pull 40GB of data off a 250GB drive. The drive is periodically dropping out and recovery is averaging 100kB/sec, so it's a slow one.

My question is whether linux has any tools that I can use to see a cluster map of the drive, and maybe even get a text output of where things are located. I don't care what files are there. just whether it's occupied or not. It's an NTFS drive, it's mountable and browse-able, and I was able to pull off $MFT. Figured maybe there was a tool to display a cluster map from $bitmap. But I've been looking around and haven't found anything.

A number of Windows tools want to scan the entire hard drive so they can get lots of file info (Sysinternals Diskview I thought would give me a text output, but it wouldn't complete scan on the drive)

Really, what I would love to do is be able to limit the sectors I direct ddrescue to. My ideal situation: a tool that would parse $bitmap and generate a ddrescue logfile, with all 'empty' clusters marked as rescued. Then I could just run ddrescue using that log file and it would clean up the rest.

I could probably take some text description of the cluster map, and convert it into the ddrescue log with a little work, but I don't have a good way of getting the first part...

advice requested.

Recently stumbled upon DDRUtility:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ddrutility/

no idea how I missed this tool for so long. As there are a lot of posts/discussions out there looking for something just like this, here's a description:

ddrutility contains a few tools. ddru_findbad is to identify all 'bad sector' files after completing a ddrescue (a second tool is a ntfs specific version of that). another tool called ddru_ntfsbitmap is to "extract an NTFS bitmap file from the source, and create a domain file to be used with ddrescue, that will allow only recovering the used portion of the partition."

sounds perfect.

Here's the documentation page. Note that there is not a precompiled version available, so that will add some complexity for liveCD /recovery disk users without a persistent user space:
http://sourceforge.net/p/ddrutility/...005fntfsbitmap