Yeah, that's probably the right attitude. I just didn't think it'd take that long, I guess.
ddrescue apparently has problems and severe slowdowns copying from NTFS to NTFS, so I stopped it and tried formatting the destination drive as ext2, then tried to restore the NTFS partition to an image file on the destination drive. Took me a long time to figure out how to get ddrescue to actually create the image file, and then it was going even slower.
So I'm back at imaging the entire drive from one to the other <sigh> Should've just left it going, but we'll mark that up to a lesson learned. Now it's going at 0.3MB/sec, so 1GB/hr. 29 days for full recovery!
Who knows, Tom, maybe you're right and it's just a controller board.
www.deadharddrive.com has an interesting story about that. But I'm at a point now where I don't want to interrupt the process at all, because it might never finish otherwise.