Lenovo T400 Clone unsuccessful - Will not boot

Can you access cloned drive data at all, eg by plugging it in using original drive as a boot drive? Also note that cloning should not take 3 hours unless it is cloning sector-by-sector or you really have that much data and drive is soooo fragmented. When you run ghost and select partition-to-image iperation manually do you see partition list listed and all partitions have valid filesystem type, eg. NTFS, FAT32 etc?

This could well be the  standard problem with cloning with a BIOS configured for non-LBA disk geometries; basically, the process you are using is one that is well known to cause problems with many models of laptops. Laptop manufacturers often ship them with a poor choice of initial BIOS configuration; there is a BIOS setting for how the disk is represented to the boot process for the operating systems in terms of Cylinders, Heads and Sectors and some manufacturers set it inappropriately (many HP/Compaq models also have this set inappropriately).

The actual disk interface uses a system called Logical Block Addressing, and USB devices in Windows also always use this system. However, for the purposes of booting the computer through the Master Boot Record, some laptop BIOSes are configured to choose incompatible pre-LBA systems for numbering the disk sectors. Now, when Ghost restores a disk image it does all the necessary work to fix things up so that the result is bootable based on the LBA-versus-CHS settings of the target disk.

So, if you image *to* a disk that is in a USB enclosure, Windows will tell Ghost explicitly that it is an LBA disk, and Ghost arranges the low-level details so that the disk will boot. However, if you then remove the disk from the enclosure and install it on an IDE controller as the primary boot disk when your system BIOS is set to a non-LBA mode, then the BIOS will present the disk incorrectly to the boot code and the system then may fail to boot.

Although the ideal is to change the BIOS settings to LBA, the simplest workaround is to let Ghost do the right fixups for the bogus BIOS settings, by performing the cloning operation when the target disk is already installed in the machine and when you have removed the  source disk and put it in the USB enclosure. That way, Ghost  will detect this specific problem with the BIOS settings and during the cloning process should adjust the copy so it boots correctly.

I was able to successfully clone the Lenovo T400 factory drive by following Nigel's suggestion.  I installed the original 160GB drive in the external USB enclosure and installed the target 320GB raw drive in the laptop.  Booted from the USB Flash drive and ran Ghost.  I did have to come back and run "gdisk /mbr" to get it to boot, but it's been running great since then.

Thanks for the help.