ddrescue is the tool I've used to do this sort of work. I don't know how it compares to safecopy, but it's quite good. It'll do dd of varying speeds/block sizes

ddrescue is the tool I've used to do this sort of work. I don't know how it compares to safecopy, but it's quite good. It'll do dd of varying speeds/block sizes to recover what it can and will approach bad blocks from both 'sides' to eck out every bit (literally) of data that it can. It'll also remember where it's scanned, where it's failed and can resume if you stop it (so long as you set a logfile - ALWAYS set a logfile!) Again, not sure if this will help but it's another option there.