This tool ignores whatever filesystem there is. It just reads it raw. It reads it as if the whole disk is just one big file. You don't need the disk to be mountable.
You can use System Rescue CD, it comes with all the tools you'll need.
Feel free to email me or PM me; i can help you through.
Thank you for the suggestions.
I was able to set it up to make it start but:
a) The key scan is taking very long. After an hour or so the program stops with 'io error: impossible to read' or something like that.
Of course the hd is crashed, so there might be some damaged clusters. Is there any way to make the program continue anyway instead of stopping?
b) The program seem to find a large number of keys. On the first scan it found 302 keys after 2 hours of work (but there was a power cut, so I could not even see the result file...). On successive scans around 100 keys. On the terminal screen I see a new line for each new key with a private key output. Is this useful in any way?
c) The file recovered-wallet.dat is written at each new key or only at the end?
I ask as I was not able to have a full run (due to the power cut and the reading errors in the next runs), but in two cases I saved the file recovered-wallet.dat. This does not seem to be populated at all. Certainly looking at it with an hex editor I cannot see any sign of the 100 keys the program tells me being recovered. Maybe they were not written yet?
Any suggestion how to make use of the terminal dump with all those private keys to attempt seeing if any of those is the lost wallet key I am after?