DiskWarrior Drive Recovery - How long & still successful?

I attempted to backup a friend's MacBook 120 Gig drive with Carbon Copy Cloner on Saturday (this machine is running latest version of Tiger). I was booted from the internal drive and cloning to an external USB drive. In the process the machine became unresponsive to any keyboard input or mouse clicks (the mouse continued tracking while this was going on).
Thinking that I was doing a read only activity on the internal drive, I powered the MacBook down with the power key. When I started it back up it seemed to reboot multiple times or some other activity that causes multiple startup chimes. (I was not sitting in front of the computer, only heard the chimes).
After quite a lot of time (multiple minutes) the computer came to a gray screen with a blinking ? folder.
I then booted the machine from a Firewire drive that I have set up for emergency purposes (Leopard 10.5.4). The internal disk would not mount so I ran a Disk Verify with Disk Utility. It complained about incorrect B-Tree size, or something wrong with the Catalog / B-Tree and indicated the drive could not be repaired. I then ran fsck_hfs with no options and got a message indicating that the B-Tree was at fault.
I considered running fsck_hfs and forcing it to rebuild the catalog, but decided that I wasn't comfortable with that approach.
I purchased DiskWarrior 4.1 and installed it on the external drive & it has been running since Sunday morning on step 5 "Locating Directory Data". Since then I have heard disk activity (sometimes a bit noisy with intermittent clicks, sometimes normal drive access sounds). The "Speed reduced by disk malfunction" count has been steadily increasing since Sunday. It is currently at 22,217.
I've read many forum posts about DiskWarrior running for days, and if this count is representing bad blocks, then 22K out of 233 million is a believeable number.
Has anyone run DiskWarrior this long and ended up recovering data, or am I waiting for a lost cause to end?
My intent is to copy whatever data is recovered off to an external drive and have this thing taken in for a new hard drive under warranty.
Anyone that has an extended DiskWarrior run that ended successfully, I would love to hear from you!

Update: I let it run for 8 days, and called Alsoft Tech Support for some advice. It appears that although the count of "Speed reduced by..." was increasing with a pretty regular pattern, DiskWarrior was trying to reread the same 7 or 8K blocks over and over. You can scan through the system log to see what block numbers are receiving read errors. In this case the errors varied from about block number 18000 up to block 25000. In effect it was just looping over and over on those blocks.
Alsoft did suggest taking steps to cool the drive since that seems to help in some cases. I ended up Cancelling the Rebuild, and I'm expecting Apple will replace the drive as faulty.

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I have just bought a Toshiba Portege T110.
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Hi!
I am replacing the hard drive for my imac a1173.
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How long to erase & format a drive?

Hi, how long should it take to erase and format a 640 GB internal hard drive on my Mac Pro?
My Mac Pro is an 8-core, 2.8 ghz MacPro, which I've had for about a year. It came with a 320 GB primary drive. Recently I bought a Western Digital Caviar WD6401AALS 640 GB drive so that I can run Time Machine on it. The WD drive came formatted with NTFS.
After opening Disk Utility, I selected my 640 GB drive and then selected Mac OS extended (journaling) before clicking on Erase. After less than a minute this ended with "Disk Erase failed with the error." I tried this a few more times and got the same result each time. Then I clicked on the "Repair" button but got messages that stated "Disk Utility stopped repairing 'diskOs1' because the following error was encountered."
I then selected the volume (listed under the WD 640 GB drive), with format Mac OS extended (journaling) again and clicked on Erase. This set a barber pole at the bottom right of the box into motion. It's been running, however, for over 13 hours at this point. If I try to quit Disk Utility, a dialog box comes up that states the operation is still in progress. Should I exercise more patience or is something wrong with the procedure?
Here is the last part of the log so far:
2009-05-08 20:37:00 -0700: Preparing to erase : “disk0s1”
2009-05-08 20:37:00 -0700: Partition Scheme: Master Boot Record
2009-05-08 20:37:00 -0700: 1 volume will be erased
2009-05-08 20:37:00 -0700: Name : “disk0s1”
2009-05-08 20:37:00 -0700: Size : 596.2 GB
2009-05-08 20:37:00 -0700: Filesystem : Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
2009-05-08 20:37:00 -0700: newfs_hfs: /dev/rdisk0s1: partition size not a multiple of 4K.
Can anyone tell me what the last line means? Thanks for your help.
Larry

Wow, Hatter, that's the fastest response I've ever received to a question in any forum I used!
I purchased this WD 640 GB drive from Tech for Less. It was advertised as an "Open Box" item and was supposed to be unused.
In my first few attempts I selected the WD6401AALS itself and tried to erase it. Every time I tried this, the procedure failed. This is the first part of the log:
2009-05-08 18:41:37 -0700: Disk Utility started.
2009-05-08 18:43:45 -0700: Preparing to erase : “WD640”
2009-05-08 18:43:45 -0700: Partition Scheme: Master Boot Record
2009-05-08 18:43:45 -0700: 1 volume will be created
2009-05-08 18:43:45 -0700: Name : “WD640”
2009-05-08 18:43:45 -0700: Size : 596.2 GB
2009-05-08 18:43:45 -0700: Filesystem : Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
2009-05-08 18:43:45 -0700: Creating partition map.
2009-05-08 18:43:47 -0700: Formatting disk0s1 as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with name WD640.
2009-05-08 18:43:48 -0700: Disk Erase failed with the error:
File system formatter failed.
2009-05-08 18:43:48 -0700: Erase complete.
2009-05-08 18:43:48 -0700:
2009-05-08 18:43:49 -0700: Disk Utility failed during an unspecified action with the error:
I noted that one of the entries at 18:43:48 -0700: states "Erase complete." This is followed 2 lines later, however, with "disk Utility failed during an unspecified action with the error:"
When I selected the "volume" itself and clicked on Erase, the erasing and formatting operation seemed to begin. I guess that in selecting "volume" I selected only the NTFS partition itself.
The only way I can stop the current erasing and formatting operation seems to be to pull down on Disk Utility in the menu bar and select "quit Disk Utility." This brings up a dialog box, however, cautioning that stopping in the middle of an operation can render some disks nonoperational.
My WD 640 GB drive is supposed to have the same warranty as a new WD drive - according to Tech for Less. I hope that pulling the plug this way won't void the warranty.
Thanks for your rapid response.
Larry

DiskWarrior Drive Recovery - How long & still successful?

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