How long for chkdsk /R and should I stop it - HELP!!!

Hi - I am a first time poster but am in a real bind. I was copying over some pics from someones drive to my external and the main pc blue screened while I was copying. I am thinking this caused my external to hiccup and come across all sorts of trouble. The drive then started with some dreaded noises and eventually ran into some real issues. I am running chkdsk /R and am starting to worry that it may be doing more damage than good. However, I don't want to stop it mid stream. It has been running for about 36 hours and is only saying 1% complete - I am getting messages about individual files being replaced due to bad sectors and I am also seeing things about folders being entirely unreadable and removed.

Some questions:
1) How much longer should I wait before I take some action - it does appear to be doing something - external drive is pounding away and going nuts, but screen display hasn't changed in a bit and cursor is still blinking at 1%.
2)Are the files really removed, or just the folders and the files still around just orphaned???
3)Should I scrap chkdsk and go for some recovery?

Any opinions/ideas are greatly appreciated.

Try to do the following to know whats going on with your hardd drive:

You have to first use Recovery Console to run Chkdsk again:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...NoWebContent=1

Set your BIOS and its Boot Order so that booting to CD-Rom is first.
Boot from the XP CD and follow the instructions here:
http://forums.techarena.in/guides-tutorials/1029549.htm

Then in Recovery Console and do the following :

chkdsk c: /r
fixboot c:
exit

Now set your BIOS Boot Order back to its original state and try and start XP. Report back, because I think some of the files needed for XP to boot are corrupted.