re: Finally, my ThinkPad is backed up and restored.

That's just what I'm saying. I downloaded the R&R program from the Lenovo site and use it to save an image of my T40 drive. It's persisted to a large USB 2.0 hard drive. WARNING: R&R formats the drive on first use. After that you can boot from the drive and choose the image you want. Note that these are not really images in the binary sense. They are composite backups. This means you can still choose an image to restore but you have to keep all previous backups as these are used to create the restored image later. I find this program fast and safe--and more importantly, it works where Ghost does not (in this case). No, I have not tried the new Ghost 10. I'm probably not going to stay with Ghost (or Symantec) because their support people (in India or Whoknowswhereistan) are, well... unacceptable.