Creating a Clone of Failed Hard drive

Buy some more drives. Do you have 4 drives installed already? Get a copy of Alsoft Disk Warrior and then use that regularly for good preventative maintenance.

There is a device that does a full sector copy of the drive - no operating system, just a disk-to-disk, runs around $299.
http://diskology.com/products.html

Disk Warrior is excellent, and in severe cases of corruption, I've heard of it taking hours to even 3 days.

Use one or two TimeMaching sets (I use one daily and another just on weekend), along with SuperDuper and/or Cargbon Copy cloner and even Disk Utility has a restore (full backup of volumes, not smart update).

For every volume, at least two backups so one is always safe and not in use, and one that is off line as well. And DVD for some critical files.

Data Rescue recovers files, it isn't really a cloning operation.

I think you need the above Disk Jockey and Disk Warrior.

No harm stopping.

Data Rescue needs to mount the drive, DJ Pro doesn't.

I would put the bad drive in FW and recover to one of your internal drives, I don't trust FW as much, and definitely not LaCie (not sure, are you using one).

If the hard drive is failing the high time estimate may actually be low-balling it; depending how far gone the drive is you may not be able to recover anything or any data you do recover will be garbage. If the drive is clicking I wouldn't expect to recover much, if anything, off of it. I've had at least half a dozen drives fail this way and only once was I able to get some useful data off the drive. You would most likely need to send the drive out to a 3rd party data rescue service such as DriveSavers. These services can cost well over $1000 depending on the amount of data recovered.

Drive clicking = dead drive. Good luck with recovery software but odds are if the drive can't be "seen" by Disk Utility and it is clicking the mechanism is dead. The data may be intact but it will indeed, in all likelihood, require a trip to Drive Savers at significant cost. Hope I'm wrong but don't be surprised when you can't recover it yourself. If the data is important then be sure you don't write over the data in your attempt to recover it.

A corrupt directory can also cause a clicking sound. Most often Disk Warrior is the only thing I trust, and zero-all the entire drive.

When you click on 'manual diagnostic' in Disk Warrior, you can see the SMART output and find how many sectors have been remapped, how many failed I/Os there are, which are a good indication of the drive's health.

Data Rescue II can always be used in demo to check if it sees your files.