So, my /home/ disk just fried on Saturday evening.

I've used SystemRescueCD to scan the drive with MHDD, and I'm getting tons of UNC and IDNF errors, but 90+% of the drive still seems to be ok... Does anyone know how I can at least attempt to copy the data off? OSes can't read the disk, so it would have to be something pretty low-level, like MHDD.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

Make sure you ddrescue the drive to an image and manipulate said image file instead of the damaged disk directly.

So I finally got around to getting a new drive and all, and I'm working on it right now. The Ubuntu version of gddrescue fails hardcore and freezes at 60MB every time... which blows, because it takes almost an hour to get that far.

Right now I'm running gddrescue through sysrescueCD to great effect. 52.199GBs of rescued data out of 52.244GBs scanned so far. Not bad I guess. It's been running for about 9-10 hours though >.<. Took it two hours to get to about 200MB then it just started zipping along. Now it's zipping and pausing, zipping and pausing. The errors are always in the same places though, so that's a decent sign that whatever the problem is, it's not getting worse.

Good luck. Usually if there's no physical damage to the drive, you can get 99% of the data back just fine. My brother recently knocked my running external drive off the table, and it was GOOOOOOOOOONE.