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 [...]

So, maybe in part 1 the data recovery didn’t work for you?
Well, that’s OK because Linux is robust against bad discs in one form or another. The trick is to work out what that might be.
A good method is to use dd or dd_rescue. These tools create a forensic copy of your hard disk drive [...]

Today, I’ve been working on a server that doesn’t want to mount one of the partitions that has been formatted with reiserfs.
Using the fsck command doesn’t work because there are bad blocks on the drive, resulting in fsck vehemently refusing to cooperate.:
Cannot read the block (41713664): (Input/output error).
To get fsck to play with such a [...]