First you copy as much data as possible, without...

yoink@tumblr ~ % date

30th August 2011

First you copy as much data as possible, without retrying or splitting sectors:

ddrescue --no-split /dev/hda1 imagefile logfile

Now let it retry previous errors 3 times, using uncached reads:

ddrescue --direct --max-retries=3 /dev/hda1 imagefile logfile

If that fails you can try again but retrimmed, so it tries to reread full sectors:

ddrescue --direct --retrim --max-retries=3 /dev/hda1 imagefile logfile