Extracting ddrescue image file pass 1

I am trying to recover data from a failing usb hard disk using ddrescue. I ran ddrescue for about 4 days at the end of which it completed pass 1. Sometime after it began with pass 2, I interrupted the process to give the laptop and hard disks a break as they were getting heated up. When I restarted ddrescue, I found that it had resumed at the spot it had left previously, but with pass 1 counting upwards again and not with pass 2 (counting down). Moreover the second pass was painfully slow covering only 5 Gb for the next 2 days. The Current status shows 0 errors and errsize as 0B and rescued as 769755 MB which is roughly the amount of data I remember being on the drive. My question is can I assume that ddrescue has already recovered the data there is to be recovered and that it is safe to extract the contents of the image file to another usb drive? or is it necessary/mandatory to let ddrescue run the remaining two passes as well?

P.S Chkdsk failed with usb hard disk with "An unspecified error occured" message. I am hoping to extract the image file to a new hard disk and run chkdsk again to see if that can fix it. Tried mounting the image file in linux, but it came back with NTFS signature missing.

Recent Questions...