So i'm taking a look at the progress you've made so far with this tool, and Haven't yet managed to play with it. But I've been dabbling in data recovery techniques for several months, and am looking for something specific which I think your program can (probably) already do.
I see many data recoveries on a daily basis, and almost all of them boil down to being able to use gnu ddrescue (http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html) to image the drive, and then I'll either chkdsk or just use photorec to carve all the data files from the disk. This usually works with little issue. The cases specifically that led me to finding your project are those where the drive is just beginning to fail, and only have a few gigabytes of transfer left in them before failing completely (Head assembly or drive motor). In many of these cases, ddrescue fails at imaging the device anywhere between 10% and 80%, after which the drive is pretty much inaccessible.
What I've been trying to research is a way to parse the $MFT and "browse" the hdd's contents (non-destructively) by accessing JUST the (copied) $MFT, and then prepare a block/sector/byte list which I can target for ddrescue's super-nice data reading techniques. GNU ddrescue accepts as input the byte-level input and output position on the drive/partition which would minimize copying useless operating system or empty blocks/sectors. The only thing needed would be a block/sector/byte list of selected files and folders (extracted from $MFT) and a script which I can try throwing together to plug that list into ddrescue.
What I'm imagining is a program that will open an MFT file, then display a file/folder tree with checkboxes. Once the checkboxes are checked for individual files/folders, the program should recursively build a list of byte/sector/block ranges that make up each of the contained files. It will output a csv or tab-delimited file with block/sector/byte ranges that comprise the selected files which can then be parsed and input to the ddrescue program. Please let me know how much, if any, of this is possible. Thank you for all your hard work.
