NTFS Filesystem – How to Delete a File with a Colon in Its Name

First, you may want to try safecopy --stage2 and safecopy --stage3 as well, to try to extract a little more from the disk.

If your copy is partial, you have a damaged filesystem. Run fsck on it (e.g. fsck -y copy-of-data.img) to attempt to repair. Note that for NTFS, you'll need a recent version of NTFS-3g. Repairing means turning the filesystem into a valid filesystem, it may well lose some of the data. So do this on a copy of the image. Then mount the image and try to recover files from it: sudo mount -o loop copy-of-data.img /mnt. Note that if fsck finds some data that it's unable to relate to a file name, it'll store it under the lost+found directory.

Sometimes, when fsck runs, it discards data because that data doesn't seem to belong to any file. A different approach for data recovery is to look for fragments on the disk that look like useful data. This works especially well for file formats that have a recognizable header, such as pictures. So try running carving tools on the copy of the disk image where you haven't run fsck. See How to recover data from a bad SD card? If these carving tools aren't easily available on your system, try the Testdisk live CD.

A few notes from my experience:

1. (the cause) If you hear an unusual sound during hd access attempts, and problems don't occur at (more or less) just random disk locations, then the root cause is most probably on the disk surface (not the electronics) - unfortunately, that's the sad scenario. If it were "just" the electronics, you might have had a chance to recover most or even all of your data.
2. (bad sectors) If you haven't already, search the web for the disk manufacturer's bootable diagnostic/recovery tool, download it, boot, run a deep test and let it try to remap bad sectors - that's the best among free methods. Note that bad sectors have a tendency to grow - so even if you manage to catch one chunk of your file after some 2314'th read attempt, chances are that those attempts just made nearby bad sectors grow, effectively decreasing the chances of recovering other parts of the file.
3. (recovering NTFS) Nothing can fix an NTFS filesystem as well as MS Windows native tools. If the NTFS image is not mountable (also make sure that you were trying to mount the partition, not the entire disk!), you can try things like testdisk under Linux, but if those fail, Windows' chkdisk can help. If you have Windows installed under a virtual machine, you can convert the raw image obtained from ddrescue to a format supported by that virtual machine (such as VDI or VMDK), add it to the VM and boot Windows in command-line mode to fix the filesystem. If you use VirtualBox, the command to convert such image is VBoxManage convertfromraw <filename> <outputfile> optionally with --format VDI|VMDK|VHD to obtain the specified output format.