Cloning large hdd seems to take forever - can I stop it without damage?

It is not clear what sort of drive you are cloning. By its size, am I correct in assuming that the HDD does not contain the operating system?

How is the target drive attached to the computer. Is it attached to an internal SATA port or is it in a USB drive? If the latter, the port to which the USB drive is attached can have an impact on the time taken.

Are you doing the cloning from within windows or are you using recovery media?

Hi,

the HDD to be cloned is containing data only, no operating system (I know, I should not have selected the cloning option) . The OS is on a 1TB SSD. The source and target HDD (2 identical 6 TB WD red disks) are both conntected to the internal SATA ports. I have started cloning from within windows, but when starting the computer rebooted and came up with a specific tool running from the scratch without starting windows. Therefore the computer is somehow locked and cannot be used for anything else before the clomning job is done or it is canceled.

It is now running since 3.5 days. You can feel that the disks are active.

Thanks, Peter

Under these conditions i would not have expected the reboot. Windows must "think" there is some OS related "data" on one of the drives. 

The PC is booting into a temporary Linux installation. The process should have completed by now (even if it is doing sector by sector which only happens if there are serious issues with the source disk). Is there a cancel button anywhere? The risks of cancelling are probably small, although I have no experience with such a situation. 

I would wait to see if anyone has something more useful to add.

Ok, I finally cancelled the process. The system rebooted and everything was like before. I checked the source disk and indeed there was a bootable windows 10 on it. Maybe this is what made Acronis clone sector by sector.

Thanks for the responses, best regards

Peter

Peter, thanks for the update. Of itself the Windows 10 installation should not trigger sector by sector. I would recommend running the disk manufactures utility to ensure there are no issues with the disk. I would go for the more comprehensive test as quick tests can faild to find critical problems. Give the disk size, it will take (possibly) several days.