General :: Rescuing Data From Windows Vista Disk

I'm trying to help out a Windows Vista user by rescuing their data from a failing hard disk. When their laptop stopped booting, I immediately pulled the disk to get as much as I could off of it using another Windows box, but the process took days and ultimately choked on multiple bad sectors and stopped responding. I then hooked it up to my Ubuntu box via a USB disk dock and ran a ddrescue on the Windows partition. The operation took a week, then seemed to get stuck for another week on the "splitting failed blocks" phase. So I have an dd image and a log to go back to, but when I resume that process it still seems to use the disk and I don't see much progress.

I then tried a plain `dd` on the disk with `conv=noerror,sync` options, and that has been running for a few days now, but with input/ouput error messages every few seconds and seemingly no records going in or out. I think that's a bad sign.What's the best, and fastest, way to get the most data off the disk as possible and into an image file, and then perform any necessary operations on the image file so that the disk is no longer needed (since it seems to be just about dead)? Er, just realized I'd put "Windows 7" in the post title, but this is a Vista partition, and I can't change the title. They're pretty similar, with one OS being much less useful than the other, but I thought I'd better acknowledge my mistake.