Following up on a post about recovering bad disks and reiser file systems, here is a list of ddrescue commands to help make life that little bit easier:
Backup MBR (boot code + partition table):
dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr count=1 bs=512
Restore boot code + partition table:
dd if=mbr of=/dev/hda
Restore, not including partition table:
dd of=/dev/hda if=mbr bs=448 count=1
Saving partition sizes [...]