External hard drive failing! Urgent! Please help!

My WD ELEMENTS 1.5tb hard drive is taking a turn for the worse.

Out of nowhere the other day, it took about 3 minutes for it to mount on my desktop. When I would try and pull a file off of it...it would take forever (i.e. 75gb took over 8 hours)

First tried, Disk Utility and it would say one of two things. Either it could not repair the disk due to a "Unmounting Error" or it would take 90 mins and finally say that the drive is fine.

Tried it on other computers...no dice...same issue.

Next, I tried taking it out and placing it into a new enclosure. That did not help.

Then I tried to use Data Rescue 3 to clone the drive to get the files off of there...but that said it would take 5-6000 hours to clone. That is like 2 months!!!

Tried tech support and they told me to reformat the drive. This is NOT an option due to the fact that there are important files on the drive that have not been backed up yet and they are for a current job. If I can't get this going...I could lose the job.

I don't know what else to do!! Is there some magical code in Terminal that will save my files or get them off of there faster so I can meet my deadline in 5 days?!

What is going on?!?! HELLLP PLEEEASE!!!

Currently running:

Macbook Pro
10.6.7
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4gb 1067 MHz DDR3

The Drive:

Western Digital Elements
1.5tb
Format : Mac Extended Journaled

Sadly if it's dying, it's dying and there is little you can do to stop it.
I would say stop unplgging it and trying in other places, as you are putting more and more strain on the components/drive.
You need to get it mounted and back up the important stuff as soon as possible, regardless of the time it takes.
Other than that, all I can suggest is trying some of the data recovery tips posted on the forum by Randy Singer, and invest in a drive for Time Machine to use.

You can try the freezer trick to see if it will work long enough to pull your data, but other than that or paying $$$$$$$$$$$ to recover the data you may be out of luck.