interesting topic, just ran into this issues.

[kpinitreal]

Hi,
Just wanted to chime in on this topic as I just had an experience with backing up and restoring my T61p.
I started out with the original HDD which was the 7200 Hitachi 160Gb.
Wanted to try out Vista so i made a backup of the XP and installed Vista on the 160 but kept the preinstall partition in tact.
I then upgraded to a Toshiba MK325GSX 320 gb
So I successfully cloned the hitachi to the Toshiba MK325GSX with the partition resized and all appeared fine.
Well I did not like Vista that much so I tried to restore the backup to the 320 and it would not work.
I restored the backup back to the 160 and tried to clone and it still would not boot.
I finally restored the hard drive using the restore to original shipping configuration from the restore partitioin to the 320gb HDD and all is fine now.

Just a strange situation that I wanted to share.