Recovering broken NTFS partition
Disk utilities in general much prefer to work with a directly mounted device. If at all possible, always make a sata (or IDE) connection.
Once you have the drive properly connected, run Testdisk, make a copy and try to repair the partition structure. This might be all you need to do to regain access to the files and it's much quicker than running PhotoRec if it's just a case of a broken partition table.
Note that if the disk is in poor shape, the "make a copy" mentioned so blithely above might best be done with a utility such as Spinrite or DDRescue.