Windows data recovery on Linux

I have a corrupted (hardware failure) HDD with NTFS file system on it. I want to recover the data using linux system and I have a general idea on how to do it, but I’m not really experienced in both data recovery and linux systems, so there’s few gaps I want to fill out before I start poking the disk.

I bought a fresh hdd and want to connect it to pc with the corrupted drive, then run linux from pendrive, make an image of old disk on a new one and then use some kind of utility to recover the data.

First of all, how should I configure the file system on my new HDD? Should it be NTFS, like the old one, or can it be anything? If it should be NTFS - what utilities could I use to set it up? Do I even have to pre set up a file system?

Secondly, what distro would you recommend me to get on my flash drive? I’m planning on using some form of dd utility. The recovery itself I can do on another system, first I just want to secure the raw data.

Finally, how to go about recovering the data (once it’s secured and probably running on my Fedora 37 rig)? As far as I’ve researched, testdisk should suffice. Is that okay? Are there any other linux based utilities I should consider?

Any additional tips, or someone willing to guide me through the process? Normally I just stick to the manuals and tutorials but this is quite important to me and I don’t want to fry this up, so I decided to ask another human being. I hope I got the right board and all.

I think a good option for the pendrive would be clonezilla. Being menu driven just helps reduce the risk of getting the wrong disk rather than a cli. And it gives you some options. Just clone from your old to your new - no preparation required such as formatting the new HDD.

Then use testdisk - you will of course need somewhere to store the recovered files.

While I agree with using FOSS, I’ll also highlight a paid (and Windows) alternative. As a previous Windows user, I used Restorer Pro - Restorer Ultimate Data Recovery for Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/7/8/2012/2016/8.1/10
I paid for several versions over decades of use. I even managed to recover data from a RAID set where it took me 3 weeks because the error drive kept causing BSOD. It really is good and so easy to use.

And good luck with the recovery!

Thanks for the suggestion!
I tried clonezilla. It looks promising and I’m sure it’s a good utility but for me it wasn’t as intuitive as I hoped for and it was kinda chugging and eventually I didn’t get full recovery from it.

I decided to format my rescue drive to create a partition there, then got a GParted Live USB stick from which I booted and used ddrescue to create images of partitions on the rescue drive. It does require understanding of the ddrescue utility and extra caution, but once I got the first partition recovered it was very smooth and straightforward.
I booted from a Live USB instead of installing ddrescue on my “main” system in order to avoid wiping it out by mistake.

My main concern was the filesystem ambiguation, so if anyone who’s also not sure about this is reading this thread; I formatted my rescue drive on linux to default ext4. The images are stored fine and when you mount them, the utilities are usually smart enough to recognize they’re in NTFS for example, so there’s no worries when recovering Windows files that way.