A little background:

Saturday, my gf's 160gb usb Maxtor drive crashed. She uses windows, when the driver is connected, the computer picks it up ( i.e. the "safely remove hardware" icon is available. But, no data could be found.

I used my ubuntu live cd ( intrepid ), booted the computer and connected the drive ubuntu could not pick it up. I opened the case, and removed the hard driver ( luckily it was an IDE drive, and connected it to the computer). I noticed that as the ubuntu live cd booted, it picked up I/O errors from the drive. Which I thought was a good thing, because in a case like that a program should be able to get something from it. I used ddrescue the first time around, let it run over night and got nothing but 260 KB of data. And a frozen computer, this is after I compiled ddrescue in the live cd environment. I figured that it would be better if the program was already installed, I did some research and found rescue remix. I connected the drives and ran ddrescue, now I have a problem.

Here's the setup:
Dimension 2400
160 GB IDE drive ( the bad driver ) set as the primary drive.
1 TB usb drive connected to computer.
1 CD-ROM of course.

I ran the following:
mkdir mnt
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 mnt
mkdir recovery
cd recovery

sudo ddrescue -r 3 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 image log
( i may have left '/dev/sdb1' out, dont' remember clearly, didn't get much sleep last night )

I started this @ 11 pm, let it run till about 8 am.
It's now stuck in a loop. The msg is constant:

[xx,xx] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector xxx

Where 'x' keeps increasing, the text is moving by too fast for me to see, but I can see that is says that roughly 50,000 kb was recovered. Should I just let it run its course? Or should I give up and try a professional?