I'm at my wits end here. I have a MacBook Pro who's hard drive has developed problems, likely due to a head crash or other internal physical damage. The drive mounts fine but it's pretty much unusable.

I have replaced the drive and put this damaged drive into an external case. For the purpose of recovering the old drive, I created a 160GB .dmg image file (which takes wayyy longer than I would have thought!) on the new drive (which is 250GB). I have tried to clone it using Data Rescue II to the image file (which is something that DRII directly supports) and although that finishes without incident, it leaves me with a damaged .dmg file that will not mount. I tried to repair that file with Disk Warrior but that failed. I tried to clone it using DRII to another physical drive. That drive would not mount and couldn't be repaired as well.

I have also tried to clone it with Super Duper! but that failed as well (error about 40% in)

Running repair tools directly on the damaged disk itself would not be wise as it could cause further data loss.

Help! What else can I try??

Give SpinRite a try

http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

...put this damaged drive into an external case. For the purpose of recovering the old drive, I created a 160GB .dmg image file (which takes wayyy longer than I would have thought!) ...
I think the problem is the .dmg step.

Last week, the original drive in my Core Duo mini began failing. (Ironically, it failed while running a BACKUP!!) I booted from an external drive and ran DataRescue against the bad drive. It took overnight* to extract about 85% of the files intact; much of the remainder have lost their filename or the storage path even though the contents are usable.

Can you run against the failing 160?

*It tries many, many times to read bad sectors--of which, I had a lot.

I booted off the dying drive (which boots fine) and ran a DR file recovery off of it. The "Quick" method (or whatever it's called) returned NO files at all. The "Thorough" method (or whatever it's called) returned lots of files but the list did not contain /users/xxxxx/library/mail at all, and that's the most important directory. I was later able to do a sucessful drag/drop copy onto the new drive of that entire folder!

I tried a DR clone from the failing drive to the new drive but the clone wouldn't mount at all, despite the fact that the failing drive mounts and even boots just fine. My confidence in DataRescue is pretty much shot at this point.

Hmmm...part of the problem with Data Rescue could be the version I'm running. I think I have 1.1.1 and according to their website, it's version 1.2 that is "fully compatible with OS X 10.5" although I'm not sure exactly what that means. It clones the drive in about 2 hours which is worth the wait to find out if the current version helps but if not, it'll trash my .dmg and it'll take 2 hours to re-create the drive image!

Yup, looks like it was the old version that was giving me the problems. The current version had no trouble gathering the file list using the Quick method and it's busy grinding away right now. Some of the sounds coming from the drive make me cringe :s