Originally Posted by Ron Bennett

Your best bet is take the drive out, set it to "slave" (often involves moving a jumper) and put into another computer, and then try copying off your data.

The long delay you're experiencing now is likely due to your operating system (ie. Windows) and/or programs frequently accessing (especially during writes) the drive and hitting some bad sectors over and over.

If the drive was dead, it wouldn't read at all. So there's still time, but key is to limit data reads/writes during the recovery process before it dies completely, which it likely will very soon.

Ron