It wasn't doing anything. Apparently it was hanging due to a dirty flag issue with the NTFS partition.

Ubuntu on my P7120 laptop can see the Windows 7 NTFS partition just fine.

I downloaded the latest Clonezilla live CD. It craps out when I tell it to clone the Win7 partition, complaining that it is dirty and CHKDSK needs to be run.

Winders can't see it - it thinks the partition is empty. So, the Windows cloning utility I have won't copy it (no drive letter). So, I can't run Winders CHKDSK on it. And I obviously can't boot the original drive any more (since Winders can't see it).

As a nearly-last resort, I booted the Win7 install DVD and went through the Repair options including /NewMBR, etc. It trundles a long time, rebooted once, but didn't fix anything (it continues to try to boot up the Repair stub). It didn't seem to break anything (thankfully).

Booting SysRescCD and running GParted shows the NTFS partition fine. If I tell it to run Chkdsk it trundles a while then says things are Ok.

Trying ddrescue again at the moment. 20 MB/s, trundle, trundle.

If it works, there's still the issue of getting Winders to recognize the partition again. :-/ If it doesn't, I'm not sure what else to do.

Grrr....

I don't want to reinstall Winders because I don't have all of the source disks for the software on the laptop (I inherited it at work from someone who left). And if I did reinstall, I'd want to go to Win7 64-bit (it has 32-bit now) and I'm not sure how one would copy stuff over without reinstalling it.

Grr...

Wish me luck.

Cheers,
Scott.
(No, Greg, Linux on this work machine isn't an option.)