I had one of my IDE hard drives go down on me about 2 weeks ago. The drive made a squealing noise during a boot, and now the bios takes a long time to detect the drive, sometimes not at all. The system sometimes boots with this drive connected, but is crazy slow (15+ minutes just to boot). This is not the drive I'm booting from. I've had it fully boot once, and could VERY slowly start to get a directory listing, but I can't imagine reading files. Both partitions on this drive are ext3. My backups have me running again on the critical stuff, but I'd like to get the rest if it's not a ton of work. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

Many failing drives fail when the actuator arm holding the read/write heads is moving allot. One of the best things you can do is have another larger drive partitioned, formatted and either installed internally or a USB drive. Boot a Live CD and mount the new large partitioned drive and use dd to make an image of the failing drive onto the new drive. The partition on the new drive needs to be larger than the size of the failing drive and formatted with a file system with unlimited file size.
Then you can either mount the image and read it normally as if it were a drive, or dd it onto another drive and try and boot it, if done correctly, it should boot.
When making an image of a drive, the actuator arm only moves from one end of the drive to the other once, most every time you'll get the image. But trying to boot a failing drive and reading data off it to copy somewhere else most often leads to hiring expensive data recovery services if the data is worth it.
In any event, it's best not to run it anymore till you're set up to make an image, the most failsafe approach to recovering precious data.
Even when it completely quits and the bios can't talk to it anymore, it can be revived without opening it up, but that's a trade secret that will cost $$ to have the procedure posted here.

Thanks for the quick reply! I was able to get an old machine to boot with the drive. After ignoring the boot errors, I have mounted a partition and am slowly copying files. If this doesn't work I will try using dd. Thanks again!