When I restore a ~500 GB disk image made with Windows 7's built-in system image tool, it runs for 8-10 hours with very little progress, and even after 3 days it is still only about 30% done.
Why is this happening, and what can I do to fix it?
Background/original version of question
I've been using Windows 7's built-in backup program to back up my 1 TB boot hard disk to another 2 TB internal disk drive, choosing to create a boot-drive system image along the way. I've tested the backup drive by occasionally restoring a few files from backup and manually verifying the contents, but never had the chance to try restoring the image. The last such manual test was a few weeks ago.
My system started acting up in the past few days, so I decided about 12 hours ago to restore from the latest image, created last Sunday. So, I booted from a Windows 7 install disc and chose to "Recover from the system image" instead of installing. I kicked off the recovery with the default options, and then I went out for the day. With the ~500 GB of used space on the boot drive, I figured it would be a full 8-12 hours before the recovery completed.
9 hours later, I came back, and not only is the recovery not done, the progress meter has barely budged from the start. Maybe 3-5% progress at most, although there is no percentage or estimated time remaining, so I can't tell whether it's just going very slowly or if it's hanged altogether. Assuming the latter, I've decided to just cancel the recovery (and by "cancel", I mean hard-reset the machine) and reformat the boot drive altogether before trying the restoration again.
So, here's my question: is it really to be expected that, with ~500 GB of data to restore, that it would really take days to restore the system image? And if not, what could be causing the problem?
