I rescued a failing 4TB SSD by creating a 3.55TB image with ddrescue,
stopping it earlier due to limited space. When trying to repair the
image with e2fsck, it attempts to expand the filesystem to the full size
of the original disk, resulting in messages like:

   "error reading block xxxxxx ..... attempt to recreate it?"

For large disks today, it would be useful if e2fsck had an option to:

1. Repair the filesystem **without padding the image with zeroes**.

2. Alternatively, treat the missing space as unallocated/empty after the
image end. So, e2fsck will not need physically expand the image

3. A tree extractor tool from damaged ext4 etc. images. At least one
would like to know what the disk contained.


This would allow recovery of partial images of very large drives without
needing extra storage.

Sincerely,
Elias