Saving my failing hard drive

Hi, I have a macbook, I think it's considered 3rd generation, I got it May of 2007. Today when I tried to boot into it it came up with I/O errors on disk0s2. I went on my desktop and a quick search says that it's probably a failing hard drive. I burnt the latest ubuntu live cd and that's where I am now. When I booted the live cd I had an exclamation mark next to my hard drive saying that it has many bad sectors and should be backed up and replaced.

What I'm trying to do now is transfer all of my files onto an external drive. I can access them through the live cd, the only problem is that it says that I don't have permission to read them. It's really frustrating to see that my picture folder is right there ready to copy, but it says I don't have permission. Is there a way around this?

Also, I tried booting up my leopard install cd and went to the disk utility. I ran the repair function and afterwards said that the disk was ok and appeared bootable, but it's not. Any ideas?

I don't know what you technical expertise is, but it might be easier for you to just take the hard drive out of the MacBook, and try plugging it into another computer. Sometimes that allows you to override those stupid permission errors. If you do plug it into a PC however, you might need a program called MacDrive, so it can read the Mac formatting system, but a trial will work for this, you don't need to purchase it.

I had a MB very similar to yours, and literally no technical experience is required. All you need to do is remove the battery, take out the three screws covering the RAM slots and the HD mount slot, pull out the HD, and take it out of the brackets.iFixit: Apple Mac, MacBook, iPod, and iPhone Repair Parts has some good tutorials