Sorry artie, i never did do much dd on an actual device. [i did play with it though... it can process anything you feed it.]

If i had to guess, i would say maybe the missing bs (block size) parameter might account for the long duration. Usually though, dd is fairly loquacious... you got no messages from it at all? Did you stop it via ctrl-C or how?

Anyway, i'll just toss in a few links here, to avoid readers having to search out where you got that from:

• Weird start up problem

• How to check a hard disk for I/O errors

Virtual1 is the voice you probably need to hear from.