Thinkpads Forum

Hi all i've been all over the interweb trying to find a resolution to my problem. I'm attempting to create an image of a brand new laptop. But when i restore the image all i get is the blinking cursor.. My bios doesnt have the predesktop option in the security tab and i've also tried the -IB switch both in creating the image and restoring. nothing have worked..

My UEFI BIOS version: G1ET94WW
OS: Win7 64Bit
Model: Thinkpad T430
Imaging software: Ghost 11.5.1

Welcome to thinkpads.com!

With Windows 7 cloning using Ghost 2003, I've had to run a Windows 7 recovery disk after the copy. It may be due to the partitioning setup used by W7 or the master boot record that Ghost does not handle properly. I don't have a specific resource web page to point to at the moment but I'll look around for it. I had downloaded a recovery disk (.iso) file some time back that I'm sure I still have at home.

ref: http://www.techfleece.com/2012/10/18/do ... -for-free/
ref: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutoria ... nd-prompt/

From you post I think you have already followed the recommendations of the following Lenovo kb but am including incase other users find this thread and don't know about the specific BIOS settings and the use of the Ghost command line switch.

http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/detail. ... MIGR-57590

Are you running the image create and the image restore both with the hard drive in your t430? because of the creative things Lenovo does the image can't be created or restored from a drive that is not physically installed in the laptop. (other systems this works fine plug the new drive in a hard drive caddy and do a disk to disk clone but in a Lenovo this will fail to create a bootable situation)

If there is any concern that the -ib switch isn't being picked up by ghost when you create your image you can go to the settings in ghost and select the image boot option if it is not already checked and then ghost will be getting all of the boot sectors. (Lenovo uses 4 sectors for the boot track no one else does and by default ghost only captures the first sector) IB only needs to be done on the image create but won't hurt on the restore.

Are you doing a disk image or a partition image? I would recommend a disk image on Lenovo systems.

How are you booting into ghost? Windows PE would be the best option from a cd or a usb disk created with the ghost boot wizard. Just confirming you are working with win7. The current ghost files will have a problem with windows 8 and the UEFI set up systems and so if working with win 8 and uefi make sure to contact Symantec and get the most updated files for that.

http://www.symantec.com/docs/DOC6587

Hope that is helpful If not can you provide more info on the steps you are taking to create the image? and also the restore?

Thanks.
Spuds

i got it to work.. before creating the image i went into the BIOS under startup and changed the UEFI/Legacy Boot to Legacy Only.
Created the image then turned it back to Both. I can write the image without having to change it to Legacy Only.