Guys, for what it's worth, the following is a great recipe for
recovering a severely screwed up drive, particularly one that works
intermittently and not long enough to use the normal file recov tools)
ddrescue + filedisk + photorec
For the ddrescue part, I used the Gentoo-based System Rescue CD.
For the filedisk + photorec part, I used the Windows port. (If you're
on nix, then you could of course mount with the "mount" command, rather
than use filedisk.)
Before I did this process, the drive would keep crapping out. ddrescue
allowed me to take a dd dump of the drive, and when it would crap out,
resume from the crapped out portion.
Any questions, lemme know. Hopefully I can save you guys a bunch of
time if this ever happens to you.
