I've had lots of failed drives under my belt and I can confirm that cloning can take a seriously long amount of time, particularly if the drive gets "stuck" on a group of sectors. If you have a few thousand sectors that are bad or marginal then it could take a significant amount of time to work through them all. I've had a SMART "short" test that was supposed to complete within 2 minutes take over an hour because the drive was so fucked up. (I let it go because I wanted to screen cap it.
)
mike-al, good luck finding a new host. If they've seen this thread then I wouldn't be surprised if they exercised their right to NOT do business with you.
(Yeah, I know you're going to flame me, so I'll just leave you with this: get some help and/or back away from the computer)