Windows XP, 750GB drive-to-drive copy, 24 hours elapsed, 70% done

Oh come on, when opening that thread I thought that your PowerBook died or something else, don't scare me :P

It didn`t but I might, I wanted to play games today - guess I`ll go retro with some...Pang! No, Lemmings! :o)

using clonezilla should take less than 4 hours

It IS very slow isn`t it? I admit I expected it to be somewhat faster, it`s doing well under 10 meg a second and they`re all 5 gig plus files...

Are the drives connected to the same cable?
That can slow things to a crawl.

@Fraggle

How are the disks connected on the motherboard? USB or PATA/SATA? What program do you use for the operation? Are both disks of the same size? In any case, it doesn't sound normal, unless both disks are connected via USB , the motherboard is old(ish) and they're different sizes. In that case, an older acronis version for example would take hours and hours. The same goes if you've booted a cloning program from CD/DVD which doesn't support UltraDMA modes for internally connected disks. Your best bet (believe it or not) to do your work reliably and quickly is doing it from windows with the freeware version of Macrium Reflect.

I was shifting 500GB from an old PATA Maxtor and a further 250GB from a WD green (not concurrently) onto a WD black 1TB, using windows explorer to simply copy the files over. All the drives appear to be operating in DMA mode.
It was atrocious but I did get a couple of `cyclic redundancy check` errors towards the end so I`m betting the old Maxtor was dying and spoiling the show.

"Using windows explorer".........here's your sign (as a famous comedian would say).



Anyway, why not give either Teracopy or Directory Opus for Windows a try?
I use Teracopy 64bit. WAAAAAY better than windows explorer will ever dream of being.
It can skip bad or missing or locked files and not quit the operation.

Using a laptop:
USB 2.0 should give you 35Mb/sec max.
SATA should do 55MB/sec max.

With eSata and USB 3.0 on my laptop I can hit 90-110 MB/sec.