>>Check your System and Application event logs.
>
>We are ghosting everything into two new drives right now. I have been working on this all night long and it is not worth it to continue to troubleshoot on such failure that occured by I really don't know. So, the way it was behaving, I really had no chance to try to troubleshoot the disk as it went really bad such as 1/20th to 1/40th of the normal speed. I did however reboot three times at first where one time an auto check disk went into effect. Then, I forced another one from Windows. On the next reboot, I then got a graphical interface for a check disk which last for about two hour. And, that didn't change anything. So, we're switching everything from two 500 GB drives to two new ones, the new models on the market. Not sure however how long this would take.

It sounds like you may have 2 drives in a RAID configuration (hopefully RAID1). If so, you need to be careful with perceived failures.

As an example, I have 2 drives in RAID1 on my main dev workstation. They use the RAID functionality in the motherboard's ICH10R controller. I've had 4 single drive failures in the last 3 or so years; what happens is:

- the system appears to hang (or at least get extremely slow)
- it takes about 10 minutes for the controller to figure out that one of the drives has failed
- after that, the system returns to normal but I get warnings that the RAID array is degraded

The RAID software shows which drive has failed. I remove it, run with a single drive for a few days while I arrange a warranty exchange with the drive maker. Plug in the replacement drive, tell the RAID controller to rebuild the array to the new drive and 8 - 12 hours later all is back to normal.

Knock on wood I've never lost any data as a result of those drive failures.

If you're running RAID1 it's important to give the controller enough time to get itself to a consistent state before trying to back up or clone/Ghost to new hardware. Usually the system will return to a usable state without rebooting, but the controller may recommend a restart. If it does, you can look at the controller software and/or Windows event logs to get an idea of what went wrong.

If it won't restart Windows you probably have a severe drive failure or controller failure. If you try to clone/Ghost in that state the process will likely fail. Cloning software by default is very non-tolerant of disk errors and will fail if it encounters any (but sometimes that isn't until a couple of hours has gone by). Some cloning software has an "ignore errors" mode but that is never the default and you need to explicitly say you want to use that. The best bet is to remove one drive from the controller, see if it will boot. If not, try the other one.

If neither of those work as a last resort you can try plugging in one or the other of the drives into an unused non-RAID SATA port on the motherboard and try to boot from that.

If you have a disaster recovery plan you may be able to restore from your most recent image backup, then restore your most recent conventional file backup on top of that.