Sometime Today, Trevor Warren assembled some asciibets to say:
Luckily no HBA or SCSI controller. Its IDE. dmesg screams io error. And fdisk -l doesn't work but throws up io errors.
sorry trevor, should have given this solution first.
put your hard disk into the freezer (T<0°C) for 24 hours. When you take it out it should work for at least 24 hours. That should give you enough time to copy the data off it.
Philip
PS: I'm not kidding. I've done this twice before.