On occasion a clients case has severe blocks of bad sectors that the hard drive requires to be cloned. The cloning process basically copies all the good blocks of data and ignores the bad blocks on to another separate usable drive. Its a bit more complicated than that in real life, but thats the general idea in a nutshell.
Anyway, I have a case ongoing currently, and its taking its sweet time over being cloned. Its clicking and making scratching noises, generally sounding terrible, you get the idea. The drive has already checked out that physically its OK. The read/write heads are still all working even though there is a lot of slow down (Hence the need to clone). The firmware modules all checked out during the SA check. A backup of the firmware was also made both to a profile directory and to DB using composite reading from all the available heads.
So in all- this has been a slow case to get going.
Once this clone is ready there shouldn’t be any major delays. The OS is Windows XP hence at least one NTFS partition. This is nice after a long running cloner like this. Hoping with crossed fingers that I can get the clone completed before needing to replace the head stack. There is a possibility that one read/write head maybe failing. Luckily I have real time monitoring of the cloned regions. Any indication of platter damage or catastrophic head failure will be easy to spot. So far ALL GREEN 
