help: data rescue from a screwed up hd partition

[Bernd Prager <bernd@prager.ws>]

Hello,

I'd appreciate some help.
A harddisc partition died on me without prior warnings. (ext3 filesystem)
The fsck command during boot suddenly reported:

$ fsck /dev/hda3
fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
e2fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
/dev/hda3: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read 
while reading block 527
/dev/hda3: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read 
reading journal superblock
fsck.ext2: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read 
while checking ext3 journal for /dev/hda3

/dev/hda1 (same disc) is still working fine.

I'm perfectly willing to replace the harddisc but I have some recent 
data on there, that I would like to recover.

I tried to read some data with the dd command and the first couple of 
blocks work ok but later it complains:

dd if=/dev/hda3 of=recover.dat bs=512 skip=613821376 count=1201216 
conv=noerror
dd: reading `/dev/hda3': Input/output error
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes transferred in 72.662230 seconds (0 bytes/sec)

Does anybody have some suggestions what I can do or have some directions 
for me?
I run Debian woody, kernel 2.4.24.
Thanks a lot,
-- Bernd