On the verge of suicide:tar & gunzip problems

[v.demartino2@virgilio.it]

I often backup the home directory of my portable pc  by means of tar  to
a desktop hd partition via nfs. The home.tar.gz is almost 2.2 GB. Both boxes
run Debian testing.

Now, following a substitution of my portable hd due to failure of the previous
one, I'm trying to no avail to restore the home dir but:

vic:/# tar -xvzf /mnt/backup-compaq/home.tar.gz
home/
home/victor/
home/victor/.R/
home/victor/.R/help.db
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers

vic:/# gunzip /mnt/backup-compaq/home.tar.gz

gunzip: /mnt/backup-compaq/home.tar.gz: invalid compressed data--crc error

gunzip: /mnt/backup-compaq/home.tar.gz: invalid compressed data--length
error
vic:/#

Now, before committing suicide having important documents on my home dir,
what steps should I try to recover also part of the tar file?

Thanks
Vittorio