A client had decided to do some important work on their Mac, without having a backup system running and their hard drive decided to go the way of a lot of drives when the weather gets a bit warmer. It would not mount on the desktop, but could still be recognised on the bus, so there was a chance that the data could be recovered. When I started the copying of the drive, it seemed to have a lot of errors at the beginning, so I decided to skip ahead a bit to save time and then left the beginning part to run overnight. When the clone had finished, a filesystem repair utility was run, which managed to get back what seemed to be a good amount of files, but there were files that had to be rescued, so this seemed to indicate that there might be some more files that could be recovered.
The client had a look at what was recovered and noticed that there were some higher quality versions of some files that seemed to still be missing, so I ran another utility that can scan the whole drive for missing files and it managed to find quite a few more gigabytes of missing data.
In the end the client managed to get most of his data back, but relying on someone to get your data back from a half dead hard drive, is no substitute for having a backup system for your data.
The below pictures are of my recovery pc while the drive was being recovered. The USB stick is just a Puppy GNU operating system, with the appropriate hard drive recovery utilities installed. The hard drive was a Mac formatted one, so I then had to recover the imaged data on a Mac, using another data recovery utility that can recover files from an HFS+ filesystem.