Time Machine - Extremely Slow (100 MB an hour)

[gnasher729]

No Bootcamp.

I did drop my laptop last week, though. Ever since, it's been making an intermittent clicking sound. That's why I'm backing everything up -- I'm having my internal HD replaced soon. I notice that when the back up is in progress, the clicking is more frequent.

So, normally, I'd chalk up the slow pace to the evidently damaged HD. However, two factors make me doubt this: a lot of other people have experienced extremely slow TM progress, and the HD transfers quite well when I manually drag a few GB worth of files over to the external HD.

Start Disk Utility. It will show your internal and your external drive. Select the external drive, and "restore". Drag the internal drive to "source" and the external drive to "destination". This will make an identical copy of your internal drive that you should be able to boot from.

If that has problems, then it is one of the drives that causes the problem. You can also use "Activity Monitor" to watch what is going on