I am currently running ddrescue on my PowerBook's former internal drive per this hint. It's finally gotten to the error-ridden area and I'm looking forward to seeing what I can recover.

Reading the INFO that came with ddrescue, I found this:

"IMPORTANT! Never try to rescue a r/w mounted partition. The resulting copy may be useless."

My old drive is connected through a USB-ATA adapter and is mounted on the desktop. Should I have not mounted it? I did not see this specified anywhere in the hint or comments - I hope I haven't wated my time (and the integrity my drive has left).

I manually stopped the process when it was about 80% through and tried to mount and got a "not recognized" error. I'm not sure if this was because the image was incomplete or because I didn't do it right.

If so - what is a good way to connect the drive to the computer without mounting it? Command-line or UI instructions would be fine... I'm not very experienced in any of these UNIX practices.