Working with photorec?

Question

Data recovery

The following question arose: if photorec is applied to an image taken from a hard disk, will the result be the same as from the original?

Answer 1

Yes.
photorec, like most forensic utilities, works with any media as well as with its image.
About low-level information, reading bad sectors, etc. out of the question - for this you need to contact the controller directly via its debugging interface (which requires some experience, special hardware and software).