I am in the process of cloning my boot partition (74GB) and it seems to take forever (I let it run overnight and I am not past 1% completion). Is it normal to take that long? More details: I had to clone it because the BIOS gave me some warning messages (I have bad sectors). Also, looking in Windows' hardware manager for the ATA/ATAPI adapters, it showed that the data transfer mode for that disk was PIO and I could tell seeing the system going very, very slow. Any comment appreciated. Thanks.

Cloning normally takes an hour at the most for a drive of that size. PIO mode can vary between 3.3 MB/s to 25 MB/s depending on the PIO mode being used. But even with the lowest speed it should take only 7 hours or so.
But, i know for a fact that damaged drives/ drives on their way out, can take weeks, and sometimes a month to fully clone...
If you can directly access the drive i would pullout only the most important data first instead of cloning the whole thing, then going back for any extra data if you can.. If you can't access the drive directly then you may just have to wait and hope the cloning is successful. If you're actually still booting off of the drive.... don't! Instead hook the drive up to another computer and get the data/clone it that way.

Some extended information. Your bios reported the drive as having bad sectors, and it did so by reading the SMART data from the drive. You're in the danger zone right away if it mentions you have just one bad sector. This is because, a drive actually has plenty of spare sectors, if the drive detects a bad sector it simply relocates the sector to one of the spares, but does not mention anything to the user. It only starts throwing bad sector errors once the spare sectors are completely used up, and by this point, if you're producing so many bad sectors that the drive can no longer relocate them, then the drive is most likely on its way out.

Thanks so much for your reply and for all the info.

I was fortunate to have all the data I cared about backed-up, so I decided to reinstall the OS on the new hard drive.

After interrupting the cloning process, I was not able to boot off the old drive anymore, so I'll have to dispose of it in a environmentally friendly manner. :-)

Thanks again.

Quote: Original post by PrisleaCelVoinic
dispose of it in a environmentally friendly manner. :-)

Thanks again.

So, you are using stainless steel shot for the skeetshoot of your old drive, rather than lead?

Nah, I have less violent plans for it :-)

I was thinking of taking it to a computer hardware recycle place (have to find one, first) rather than throwing it in the garbage.

On the other hand, I don't feel comfortable leaving it w/somebody in whatever place (just my paranoia, I guess, because I'm neither rich nor famous). Or maybe I can open it up and try to smash the platters to make sure nobody can spin them anymore and then take whatever leftovers to a recycling place...

Quote: Original post by PrisleaCelVoinic
Nah, I have less violent plans for it :-)

I was thinking of taking it to a computer hardware recycle place (have to find one, first) rather than throwing it in the garbage.

On the other hand, I don't feel comfortable leaving it w/somebody in whatever place (just my paranoia, I guess, because I'm neither rich nor famous). Or maybe I can open it up and try to smash the platters to make sure nobody can spin them anymore and then take whatever leftovers to a recycling place...

You can heat the platters beyond the curie point for their magnetic material, though i am unsure what that would be for your drive, the coating and substrate varies with manufacturer and hard drive type. A more, for sure, method would be to open the drive up, unscrew the platters, and take a razor blade to each head (side). Though, then again, if you heat the drive up in an oven to the curie point or beyond the coating may just melt, which is plenty secure.
Though, this is all assuming you can access the drive from windows. If you can, just use an app like Eraser and do a 35 gutmann pass, which should be enough for anyone who isn't part of the CIA to recover the data.