OK I have brought this thread back from the dead.....and hopefully I can do the same to my HDD

IIt crashed yesterday and I have been dreading not being able to save any data. I have done heaps of research, hence my arrival here, and I am up to the stage of running ddrescue. First off though I just want to ask a few questions to make sure I have got it right.

The situation. My laptop hdd died, bad sectors after diagnosis tests. I did have a spare 2.5 inch external drive so I pulled it out of the casing and put it into my laptop. I have done a fresh install and am now at least back on line. I put the dead hdd into the casing so I could use it via the usb adapter. I have got knoppix 6 on a cd and have bootedit up for a sticky beak. I logged into the ltxterminal as a root user. got another external hdd that i want to copy to. So I have 2 external hdd now, the dead one, and the one i want to copy to.

This is where I am getting a bit nervous because I have read a lot in 24 hrs about the best ways to do the next step.

Some say put the -r command in to make the drive read backwards, some say just get good sectors first then try for the bad ones as well. I am kinda lost now.

I am expecting to boot knoppix, plug both hdd in and then in the ltxterminal enter a commands as suggested at (http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue) like:

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

except I was thinking of also putting in the path to the good ext hdd to copy to straight away.

I guess I am seeking some clarity on this process and the correct syntax I should be using.

Many thanks to any that can help..My head hurts.

Thanks.