Got a 320gb Fujitsu laptop hdd im trying to copy sectors from, using ddrescue on linux.  The read rate is around 1600kbytes/s and it doesnt matter which part of drive I attempt to copy sectors from its still very slow to copy, however it is copying which is the good thing.  At this rate its going to take around 5 days or even longer.  Sometimes the whole thing slows down even more to a few kb/sec with it still actually copying most sectors with very few errors.  Is there any reason why a hdd slows down significantly like this but is still able to copy?  Definately not the sata cable or mobo, as its a previously working pc im using to do this.  I've checked the copied sectors in hexedit and there is data there, so it is actually recovering the data just very very slowly.  For now im going to change the command line parameters bit I think and tell it to skip blocks if the read rate falls below a certain level, just be safe and try to get as much data as possible before the thing completely fails.  I managed to get around 40gb copied overnight.