Second the idea of making an image backup. Screw up recovery on an image; you still have the original. Screw up the original and you are -- well -- (heh) -- you know.
ddrescue and dd-rescue have identical aims but one is a fork of another. The history over at askubuntu forums tries to straighten it out. The one I like best comes from GNU and is usually called ddrescue, but sometimes it comes out as dd_rescue.
I was flogging smartmontools the other day in a post not far from here; this seems a good place to flog them too. smartctl talks to the SMART interface of the drive. If smartctl -i /dev/sd"x" ("x" some letter addressing the whacked drive) doesn't elicit a response, you have a paperweight that happens to look like a hard drive - so it's a good first step in saving yourself from burning a weekend; you learn there is nothing that can be done early in the game.
I was also flogging System Rescue CD. It's a distro dedicated to rescuing other distros, so if you have to put a distro of some sort on a USB stick, methinks that is the one: it has all the recovery toys @Dexter_Kane mentioned, plus mine, and then some. It's based on Gentoo, but don't worry: it's been denatured so it won't seep through your skin and eat your brain. I promise. I really, really do. ;)