Extremely slow clonning with ICH9R, 100 GB can take a month

Hi everyone,

I got 2 disks (st3250410as 250GB 7200rpm sata2) on an asus P5K-E mobo, not using RAID, 4 G ram.

On win-7, one day I got an error about a file couldn't be read. Took a look to system events, and there were thousands of read-errors / repair events which had began 3-4 days before, without me noticing. Then I got some more file errors, and got a blue screen, when the page file got corrupt.

I believe the system can boot with no trouble again, but I don't want to make more writes on the disk and make further damage. I have some valuable data with no recent backups.
I need to copy the partition to the other drive using a bootable environment, then find / work on the files which may have damaged, and recheck the bad sector table.

I got;
disk 0 (the problem), with 1 ntfs partition nearly half the size of the disk
disk 1, cleaned up. free

The Problem :

I try to clone the partition using the bootable cd from Hard Disk Manager 2010. I get extremely slow speeds from the beginning. Looks like the problem is the read speed. It copies about 240 MB an hour, 1 GB in 4-5 hours right from the beginning. I thought it was the problem areas, and it would get faster once it finishes the problem areas. But that's not happened in the first 1 GB.

After 4 - 5 hours around 1 GB, I stopped clonning, thought it will never speed up. Then tried some other stuff, browsed the disk, read different sectors. It read instantly, except for a sector (220CD H) which I know is problematic due to a read error I got with a disk clonning utility before. Then before writing this message, I started the clonning process again, with the same speed.

Why it can be something other than a disk trouble :

- The speed looks VERY constant, HDD led flashes once, lites for 3 seconds, then during the next 28 seconds flashes just once on the 14th second. Not sure what happens in that 28 seconds.

- The system did boot with no problems before bsod, and no noticable slowdown (I don't want to boot it again just for a try) Ie it's very unlikely all 1 GB is completely bad sectors.

- During the process, mouse cursor and keyboard barely response between those 28 sec periods.


May it be SATA2 or ICH9R or something? Any known issues? With this speed, it would take 20-30 days to complete.

Thank you!

 

update:

after 6 hours+ I'm stopping it on 1.3G again. I'll take a look at the bios settings, and try a sector read test if I can find one. I'll try to make another test on a live cd linux OS or install a windows on the 2nd drive and try there.

 

update :

I tried changing SATA mode from 'enhanced' to 'compatible' with no difference in speed.

I created a test partition on the target drive and copied it on the same drive with no speed problems.

One of the disks appears on port 6, I'll try to change locations of disks.