Hi List; I have FC5 on an IBM Thinkpad Z60m with 2G of RAM and a 100G SATA HD. I also have a removeable CD/DVD drive and I can insert a HD adapter into the "ultrabay" which adds a second HD attached to the main bus (as the CD/DVD would be). I inserted the second 100G ATA HD into the ultrabay and booted into single user mode. The second HD shows up as /dev/hdc my main HD shows up as /dev/sda. (Note if I boot with hdc=noprobe into single user mode then the system is not aware of the root user) I run this: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/hdc bs=64K & pid=$! Note: I've tried the same with bs=128K, bs=1M, bs=256K and with no bs tag at all with the same results Then I check the progress from time to time with this: kill -USR1 $pid I find that my avg speed in 1.7m/sec which leads to a full backup time of around 16-17 hours. Before the deal with M$ I used to run SuSE 10 and was able to do a dd on the same laptop inside of 4 hours. Any help would be much appreciated.... Thanks in advance