HD recovery problem

e1705 Dell laptop/Vista Home Premium/Acronis TI11 Home

2 years ago I replaced a good 80gig internal HD with a 500g and successfully used AT11 to restore my partitions to the new drive, no problems. During an attempt to create a dual boot system with Ubuntu on the 500g, something went wrong and the 500g drive was corrupted. I took the 80g, plugged it back into the laptop, created a new full backup to an external drive, formatted (with, at different times, both Dell Windows reinstall disc and Acronis 11 oem disc) the 500g drive and attempted to restore the backup to the formatted 500 drive. After initiating the restore, Acronis progress bar says the restore will take 9 days. The internal drive activity light is fully lit, but the activity light on the external drive only blinks every few minutes. What is wrong with my 500g drive that is taking so long to restore? I've formatted, created new NTFS partition. The full backup from the Dell original install contains some Fat 16 and Fat 32 partitions, which I thought might be a problem, but I have restored these same partitions before without this problem. It seems to me there is a problem with how the 500g drive is formatted or partitioned or initialized.

I have also tried the above with cloning, but with same results. What am I missing? I have about 100 hours in this problem. I am confident that there is no physical problem with the drive.

Ric