Anyone here Linux savvy? trying to rescue drive data

My main Mac drive went tits up a few weeks ago. After $250 worth of minimal "lazy" recovery by a computer shop in my area I still want to try to rescue my drive. As far as I know it was not a mechanical failure (drive spins,bios sees it) It's just that the boot partition, and OSX file directory are Swiss Cheese with bad sectors. So bad that even Mac's version of Diskwarrior couldn't rebuild it. "Invalid node structure"
I couldn't even clone the drive with Clonezilla, because of that messed up directory. So I just cloned the second partition and got a fsync error at the end? I'm going to still try and mount the Clonezilla clone to check for files. I'm just not so great at Linux command line stuff.

The computer place rescued approximately 300g of 650, but to my disappointment a bunch of audio files that show full size and tags will not open. Some are fragmented when I try to open the raw data in Audacity. :(

Years ago I rescued files off a drive in much worse shape than this one with an app called Spinwrite, it literally took a week though. Spinwrite would hit a bad sector and try to read it a 10000 different ways (forward,backwards,upside down lol) I was told Spinwrite can do more harm than good though, and the drive could fail during the process if it takes more than a few days.

Anyway I'm not up on the latest Ubuntu goodies, I just know most pros use Linux based recovery tools for bad drives. GNU DDRescue,Testdisk,Photorec etc.

Really I just want to rescue some certain folders and the only filetypes I care about are pics and audio.

I think this case is very similar to what happened to my drive. I wish this guy had made a detailed step by step tutorial before he decided to go on indefinite holiday.
http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/node/212

Anybody with knowledge on the subject feel free to chime in. :)

You had me until I read you had a mac! B)