2 days to back up 30GB's on 160GB HD?

I am trying to back up my 160GB hard drive 18GB of which is currently used on my Windows XP E-Machines computer. I started copying image of drive "C" to drive "C" so that I could then burn to DVD. I walked away from computer and an hour later returned to find only one green tic on the progress bar and 2 days 1 hour remaing. I cancelled the job and my computer has since been very slow. I ran Norton Clean Sweep, Emptied Recycle Bin including Norton protected files, restared with no improvement. I also tried to do a system restore with Windows System Restore and it tells me restore fails. After using Norton's Ghost for years I still LOVE True Image so any suggestions are very apprieciated.
Thank You all for your help!!

 

Hello Gospel Grunt,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We also strongly recommend you to update your copy of Acronis True Image 8.0 to the 826 build. In order to get access to updates you should register account on our site (or just log in if you have already created it) and then register your copy of the product.

If the problem remains please try to create image from the bootable CD.

Thank you.
--
Irina Shirokova

 

if your running raid. enable write cache