Manual trace in illustrator

Can anyone let me know if there is a way of manually tracing a pixel based image that has been placed into Illustrator.
I know illustator has a fantastic Live Trace tool and this works for 90% of the designs I am trying to convert.
The tool i am looking for would be similar to the magic selection tool in Photoshop, where you can manually trace the outline of a design and  the clever little boffins in the photoshop engine magically pick up the edges of the pixels for me and make it a selection, in Ilustrator i need this tool to create a path not a selection.
Currently using CS5
Am i just better off using Photoshop to create the selection and exporting the paths to Illustrator.
Tony

Tony,
The silver bullet is the Pen Tool; it takes skill to fire it.
Just a (very) few hints, apart from reading the fine manual/helpfile, which is actually helpful here:
You may:
1) Place a locked copy of the raster image to recreate, possibly with reduced Transparence, possibly on its own lower Layer;
2)  Use the Pen Tool to trace the image, Click Dragging at crucial  positions, using the Handle dragging to shape the path in between, thus  creating one Anchor Point at a time; during this, you may change the  position on the current Anchor Point (freezing the Handles) by pressing  the Spacebar
3)  You may work with paths that have both Fill and Stroke or split (by  copying into separate paths with either), and you may  Object>Path>Outline Stroke to create narrow filled paths instead  of stroked path, Object>Path>Offset Stroke to move the border  outwards or inwards, etc.

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