Mount Partition from drive with corrupt partition table

[Nevermore]

Greetings,

I'm trying desperately to rescue some data from a failing hard drive. Long story short, the partition table must be wasted and be located amongst unreadable/unwritable sectors. Testdisk is able to find the partitions by scanning the drive's cylinders, but writing a new partition table does not change a thing.

At any rate, I know that a lot of the data is still there because photorec was able to recover some, but not all, of my pictures. If I understand correctly, photorec rarely picks up fragmented pictures, which is probably my problem.

This said, what I would like to do with Knoppix is try to mount one of the partitions from the disk, then try to read the data (praying that the filesystem on teh partition is intact). Is it possible to mount a drive with an offset, the way you can with a disk image?

The best I can figure is to use something like this, but I'm not sure this is correct (or even possible to do):

mount -t ntfs -r /dev/sda /mnt/mt1 -o offset=(offset in bytes)

Any thoughts?

Also, anyone know how to make sense of the "start" of the partition that testdisk shows me? (13430 0 1) How can I convert this to bytes?

Thanks for your time,
Mike

[rusty]

Here's a few tools you can look at:

http://lde.sourceforge.net/

http://linux.die.net/man/8/badblocks

http://linux.die.net/man/8/gpart


HTH