Your drive is VERY LIKELY no good to begin with, so there is no "risk" to just turning off the system. As with ALL hardware install/uninstall operations anymore, you want to make sure power is all-the-way off before mucking around "in there" -- so unplug the A/C adapter AND remove the battery.
Then pull the HD and replace it & restart your imaging process on a "good" drive.
The only thing you risk by just powering down the laptop once the drive image starts failing is the HD itself -- which is bad anyway, so being overly careful is like putting bubble-wrap around your trash bags before you take them to the curb!
I certainly agree with rindi above -- once the failed HD is removed, check the warranty status... but note: OEM drives are covered solely by the system manufacturer's warranty (usually only 1-year), whereas non-OEM drives will be covered by the drive maker themselves (usually 3-5 years these days).
IF (and only if) the drive is IN warranty, download and run the drive test suite from the manufacturer -- this will generate a "failure code" that they will want in order to issue an RMA. (NOTE: warranty replacement isn't FREE -- you pay the shipping to the maker, they pay the shipping of the replacement back to you).
Good luck!
Dan
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by: rindiPosted on 2009-07-01 at 23:58:54ID: 24760944
You should just be able to power off (use the button on the PC) to stop it. Then test the disk you are cloning to using the HD manufacturer's diagnostic utility and replace it if it is bad (or get warranty replacements working if these are new machines. These tools you'll find on the UBCD.
http://ultimatebootcd.com
Another tool you could use to diagnose or repair the disk is to use testdisk. This can be found on the PartedMagic CD which has clonezilla too (possibly this is included on the beta UBCD).
http://distrowatch.com/tab
If you keep on having the problem even if the disk you are cloning to is OK, you should also test the source disk.