Re: Data recovery on my broken disk.
Grub error 17 is not usually associated with bad sectors and in most cases can be fixed by reinstalling grub via a live cd. However, what you have added re the state of the files on image you obtained via dd_rescue sounds somewhat ominous.
What you have done so far sounds good, as in, you have imaged the original drive and have another drive to copy retrieved data to. That is all good .
Again, with how you have described the state of the files and (presumably) the filesystem, from here on, things don't look so good. You could try this on the ext 4 image and see if it works, the drive sounds as though it could be fragmented, but more likely files have become corrupted by some other process.
If that doesn't make things look an better, it would be best to use dd_rescue again and re-image the original hard drive, to get the image back to an untainted/unchanged 'clone'. From there, the only thing I can think of is to use a data carving program such as photorec (part of testdisk), magicrescue, foremost or scalpel and see what sort of data they can retrieve. They are all available in the repo's and you can find tutorials on the internet re how to use them. Magicrescue claims "it looks for file contents, so it can be used both as an undelete utility and for recovering a corrupted drive or partition. As long as the file data is there, it will find it".
You should be able to get at least some files back.
Hope this is a bit helpful. It at least will be an educational experience in data retrieval. Good Luck!
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