Cannot Restore Hp G9 Pavillion Laptop Due To Network Issues

I'm having great difficulty restoring an HP G9 Pavillion laptop running a 64 bit version of W7.
Initially i was getting the common error of "cannot find your homeserver" and believe this is down to the Realtek NIC onboard.
I overcame this by using a USB to ethernet adapter and loading the drivers for this at the prescribed time
and hey presto i have connectivity and i can see my homesever.
After going through the restore wizard the restore starts but someway into the restore the laptop throws up
a network connection error message saying that connectivity has been lost even though i can see activity on my switch and the LAN adapter.
The laptop has 3 partions, system,C and D (recovery), i use the wizard and let it restore all 3 but could this be the cause of the problem?
in a vain hope i used an initial backup and this looked promising as it proceeded naerly all the way through
only to get 13 seconds away! then the time to restore jumped to 24365 days 0 hours 13 secs, at this point i clicked on cancel and the laptop
surprisingly booted up.
Has any body out there experienced similar issues? any advice greatly appriciated.
Should i concentrate on getting the onboard realtek working? and How
Many Thanks