[LinuxUsers] advice on "dcfldd:/dev/sda: input/output error" ?

[Roger E. Rustad, Jr]

I'm helping a coworker recover some stuff of a failing drive. It's quite 
important to him, as his little girl is very sick and he has some 
pictures of her on it.

I'm hoping to get a clean bit-by-bit copy of the drive while I still 
have options. The hard drive is obviously failing (chunks are bad, and 
parts of the hard drive just don't show up), and I want to get a big 
rip/dump of everything on the drive (including deleted stuff) before the 
drive is retired so that he can later pic through it and recover what 
might be salvageable.

Using System Rescue CD, I ran dcfldd on the drive and split up the 
images in chunks that would read to an attached FAT32 drive. (I'm fairly 
sure that the command is right). However, I'm getting the following 
error (below is a pic of my monitor)

twitpic.com/1iu9v

The dcfldd command that I've been running has been going on for over a 
week (/dev/sda is the screwed up IDE 160 GB hdd), and if that's what it 
takes to get a clean dump of the raw data on the hard drive that I can 
later work on, then that's cool and I'll just leave it.

But if I should cut my losses and do something else here before the 
drive fails further, please let me know so I can do so fast before the 
drive takes a turn for the worse.