DD not working--SUCCESS!

[Jacques B.]

I neglected to mention.  If your original drive has problems (i.e.
bad/failing sectors), you may want to look at an alternative such as
ddrescue (http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/).  I have
successfully used ddrescue to recover a dead floppy on two different
occasions.  Of course it can do the same for a hard drive.

Again, run from a live CD environment so find a live CD which has it
installed, or install it in the live environment after booting up
(either by getting it online, or downloading it to a flash drive first
and then booting to your live CD, mounting the thumb drive and
installing ddrescue from it).

Jacques B.