[vox-tech] Failing Hard Drive Recovery

[Alex Mandel]

I've got a 40GB Laptop hard drive that boots about 5% of the time.
Figured out that it's not the motherboard since sliding a new drive in 
seems to work fine. So I'm trying to copy off the info from the old disk 
to a new one.

I was going to run dd or dd_rescue or ddrescue, but I can't even get 
that far. (Running all in sudo su on Knoppix 5)
fdisk -l
   "Unable to read /dev/hda"
gpart
   Fatal Error: cannot get sector size on dev(/dev/hda)
testdisk
   Can't find any partitions on the drive, and when it's looking it's 
showing all sorts of read errors.

The disk Physically isn't making any clicking or excessive heat. I tried 
putting it in a USB case but that didn't seem to help.
Both the BIOS and the knoppix tools see it as a 40GB HD with 37. GB 
usable. And no, mounting is useless because of the previous issues.

Should I just run dd_rescue and see what I get? I guess the problem 
there is I'm moving from a 40 to 100 GB drive and wanted to make a 
bootable partition to shove the old data into, but that procedure 
doesn't quite work when I can't see partitions.

Any more ideas?
Alex