aside: I suggest people use ddrescue instead of cat.
1. It provides flashing lights showing activity and speed (cf the cat command which just sits there for a few hours and then returns you to a prompt. Hmm)
That's useful, if one is baby-sitting the transfer.
2. It retries any bad sectors it may come across rather than just stopping (which is why it's better than dd)
No, not really. Both the kernel and the drive firmware will already retry bad sectors (over and over and ..), so there's no need for userspace to do it. But what it will do, if there are uncorrectable bad sectors, is continue on after them. But bad sectors are not terribly likely here, or Stu would have already mentioned them.
3. It should be faster than either of them.
Dubious.
The Ubuntu LiveCD is a far better way to go for this.
And if one really wants to learn/use ddrescue,
then just install it on the fly (into RAM)
after booting from the LiveCD:
apt-get install ddrescueCheers
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