Hi Josh. If you want another software option to try, you might try Spinrite from www.grc.com. If you are fighting with a damaged platter surface which is weak or almost unreadable, Spinrite has a good chance of recovering the data. If the data was actually over written with the wrong data, you're out of luck. I've used Spinrite a few times on drives that became weak and difficult to boot. It sometimes takes a long time to recover a bad sector, but I usually have more time than money. Since it is trying to read and write the original drive, you may want to do the dd first, just so you've got the corrupt copy to work with. Spinrite boots and runs from FreeDOS to do its job. If your drive is marginal for hardware, Spinrite might drive it over the edge. If your data is critical and the drive has physical damage, I'd try to arrange it so you don't have to shut off the computer from the time you start Spinrite, to the time you reboot from a recovery disk and copy your data to a blank USB drive you just plugged in.... If you go to the web site they do have a good write-up of what Spinrite is doing. It doesn't know or care what the data is, it basically reads until it gets a good checksum and writes the data back to the drive to refresh the surface. If the data read back is still bad, it has some capability of moving the data to a good sector using the drive's spare cylinders. I'd try this $100 solution before I tried the $5000 solution. Good luck! Doug Reed, N St Paul.