How long for cloning?

[BorisMD]

Sorry if this seems like a recurrent of crazy question, but I just replaced the hard drive on my PowerBook, and on the advice of MacWorld, decided to try SuperDuper for my cloning.

My old HDD had about 25 GB of data on it. I have enclosed it in a housing, attached it to the PB, via Firewire, and booted from the external drive.

The superduper program has now been running for over 22 hours, and it is only about half way through the cloning process. Is this normal?

Thanks,

Boris

[dnanian]

That's definitely not normal, Boris. Is the drive still blinking? If you look at the log (Cmd-l), are there any errors being written? Do you have AntiVirus installed?

[BorisMD]

Hi Dave,

No anti-virus up and running. At one time, I had the one you got free with dot mac, but I don't use it.

Command L gave me two logs, one for the console, which says I partitioned ok, then a bunch of timeout logs for isync, etc. Oh, yeah, it also shows SD going up.

The log for SuperDuper shows SD doing it's thing, then a bunch of entries like this:

ignoring /private/var/tmp/*****

with number/letter combinations in place of the *'s.

Should I stop and try to restart? Or try something else.

Also, I did a command i on the new internal HD, and it shows about 15 gb already used up, so I think the thing is working , just really slow.

As for the blinking light, it really doesn't blink much, I can feel the HD spinning, and the head makes an almost clock like ticking. If I try to access another program, it then does a more "normal" noise for a while. But using any program from the ext firewire HD is really slow.

Hope that helps.

Boris

[dnanian]

Something really sounds wrong with the hardware, Boris. It's hard to say what, but this just isn't even remotely normal...

I'd stop it, then try booting in Safe Mode (hold down shift, and keep it down, during power on & boot up). Then, give it another shot.

If that doesn't help, I'd try erasing and zeroing the destination drive's data and free space. Maybe it's having a lot of retries?

[BorisMD]

One of the reasons I replaced the HD is that I was worried something might be going wrong with my HD. It was making the more loud noise to access data. I thought it was either full, so it was skipping around more, or maybe something was physically wrong.

It is now about 3/4 of the way done, so maybe I'll just let it complete it's task.

I'll report back.

Boris

[dnanian]

OK, sounds reasonable... best of luck!