I was given a badly damaged 500 GB hard drive from a laptop to recover data from. As always, computer owner had no backups (sigh !).
At first, I’ve tried mounting the drive in Windows (it was an NTFS formatted drive with Windows on it after all) but no go. I could get the drive letter to appear but when trying to access it, Windows told me the drive wasn’t formatted.
I was about to quit on trying to recover the data but then (as a last resort) I’ve decided to try to mount the drive (read-only, of course) on my Linux server with NTFS-3G. And (LOL !) it worked !

WTF Microsoft ?