Clone Thinkpad Drive to USB External Drive?

This is an issue that seems to have an endless supply of problems and solutions.
I want to clone the 40G HD of my Thinkpad T30 to a 40G 3.5" PATA hard drive in a USB enclosure using TI9. Everything seems to go OK in the cloning, but when I take the laptop drive out and try to boot from the USB drive, all I get is a blinking cursor. I know there is a hidden recovery partition, but I've read TI9 clones that along with the rest of the stuff. Gone through the BIOS a hundred times, I can't see anything there that will change the situation.
Am I really missing something big here? The more I read about it, the more confusing it gets. I'm ready to give up.
Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated.

 

If I understand you correctly you want to boot your cloned installation from an external USB drive.

The answer is that you cannot. Even if the computer can boot from a USB drive a Windows installation will not play ball.

I understand that it can be done with a lot of extra effort or perhaps a specialised USB hard drive with its own software to enable this functionality.

So it would seem to depend on how badly you really need this service and if the drive could be used on other computers what would be the legal position.

Xpilot

 

What I'm trying to do is create a clone of the laptop drive so I can use it as a backup because I want to install a new laptop hard drive using the external USB clone. The only reason I tried to boot with the USB drive is to test the cloned drive. If I knew I could install a new laptop drive, clone the new drive from the USB drive and it would work, I wouldn't care if the USB drive would boot the computer or not.
Laptops are kind of limited as far as hard drive connections go, so to clone the original drive, I'll have to buy a new 2.5" hard drive and some way to connect it to the computer via a USB>2.5" IDE conversion cable of some kind, an adapter for the auxiliary drive bay(but then I wouldn't be able to use the Acronis Rescue Disk to boot the computer), or clone the drive to another drive in an enclosure, install the new laptop drive, then transfer the cloned image back to the new drive with the Rescue Disk.
I have a drive in an external enclosure, that's the cheapest way to go, so I'm trying that first.

 

You don't need to clone the laptop hard drive. Just create a full drive backup image to the external usb drive. Then install the new hard drive in the laptop, boot from the rescue cd and restore the image from the usb drive. In my opinion, this is much easier than trying to clone a laptop drive.

If you have network access on the laptop (and the rescue cd supports it), you could save a backup image of the drive over the the network to another computer. Then install the new drive in the laptop, boot from the rescue cd and restore the image. I just did this recently and it worked well, though more slowly than usb.

 

That sounds like a good idea, I'll give it a shot.
Fooling around with laptop drives is kind of a pain in the butt compared to PCs.

 

To really test the Image you still have to buy another laptop drive, install it in the laptop and Restore the image to it. I would not recommend Restoring the Image to your present laptop drive, in case the Restore is not successful.