Will not boot after reload of OS

Question

Ok, so here is my tale of trouble.  I have a Lenovo T61 Type 6463-5BU, S/N L3-xxxxx.  The hard drive died a couple of weeks ago, and I have since then received a replacement drive under warranty, i.e. the exact same type of drive.  We had a backup image of the old system under Norton Ghost and managed to get the image back onto the new drive once it was installed.  To do this we used a utility OS called
"BartPC".
Since then I have done just about everything I can think of to get the system to boot, including playing with the BIOS settings, setting the drive to "boot" and "active" using a number of utilities including good old "diskpart" and several others.  The drive will simply not boot.  A couple of times I was able to read the drive using Bart in command prompt mode, but I never managed to boot from it.
The laptop does have a finger print reader, but I have been told several times that this does not have anything to do with the problem.  So... before I cut someone's finger off and swipe it across the reader... what am I doing wrong here?
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Answer 1

Absolute pre-req / reset that BIOS to default settings, lets eliminate any setting that can also hose you up even after you've solved the problem
Clarify when you described reading the drive a couple times from "BartPC" , are the drives contents viewable EVERY TIME BART is used for boot ? //// did you mean Bart PE?  It has to be asked since the PE's and BART is the widely accepted recovery tool and saved myself on numerous sytems and esatblishing the post with access to a BART-PE will assist with follow up suggestions knowledable of the tools at your dispoalsa.
If I had to make a best guess and from a decent portfolio of steps you've tried, I would speculate you need a chkdsk  because drives afflicted with mechanical failure will corrupt files while they're physically dying.  More often the cause of disk failure isn't mechanical inside but actually a scorched or failed circuit off the bottom of side and removing the circuit board to view the hidden side can be extremely revealing of where the problem lies. 
if you haven't already returned the dead drive, then examine the PCB and it is often affixed with TORX heads to prevent the toddlers from removing it while the rest of the world had received a torx head screwdriver set before their 8th birtday.  Your probelm could be asily sovled by swapping the pcb from the new unbootable replacement onto your old drive where the data is still hostage and resuming a normal life.
A drive that is accessible and only sporadically between sessions or seems to crash inexplicably and incosnteslty could be easily solved with a chkdsk repair included form Micrsofot,
chkdsk c:  /f  /x and if that data is really trashed those can take a day or even more to finish.
Assuming you aren't trying something heroic such as taking an image from an IDE drive and reloading to a SATA disk,  get a USB floppy drive and create an NT boot disk. Your description hints you're familiar with boot loaders and the comforting part of NT boot disks is they only require being formatted by an NT kernel and even a format a: /q is the necessary first part and no /sys switches such as Windows95 and FAT32.
- Copy a compatible from equal or newer version of boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect.com to the floppy, in the history of Windows most often an older ste of boot files can still kick off a newer version such as NT4 / SP4 versions of those files could still load Windows 2000, but it seem XP was a delineation and w/o any knowledge of how isolated you and this system may be located take the best road and load those startup files from the old image but that is assuming you know they weren't damaged or from a comparble OS
The key to this step is having the right boot.ini settings and if the drive is mounted in the native bay you can keep the boot.ini lines to "basic"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="DontG​etPreoccupedWithTheOSdecreiptoin, but don't make it too long enteirh and if you still insist on spaces then ensure you use quote3s.l" Notice how Cutler chose to use Zero notation for the controller and disk ID but got cheeky on the partiont numbers so the first partyion INS'T PARTIOTION ZERO LIKE THE REST OF HIS PATHS.
Just becase you see a boot menu doesn't mean the problem is becoming solvede, the floppy disk should give you the same boot menu even if the system was diskless.
I'm advising you try tidfeeretn partiton numbers since you mentioned you've been dinking around with this disk and with ut's and it is possible the actual boot partion ID# could've been changed depending on just what was excueted/
Assuming you didn't use a diffetrent direcoty name than Windows then this one should work rather well and you can copy this block of text as the test boot.ini
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW​S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="PARTI​TION 1" /fastdetect /sos
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="PARTI​TION 2" /fastdetect /sos
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="PARTI​TION 3" /fastdetect /sos
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINDOWS="PARTI​TION 4" /fastdetect /sos
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(5)\WINDOWS="PARTI​TION 5" /fastdetect /sos
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(6)\WINDOWS="PARTI​TION 6" /fastdetect /sos
Still failing, then eject as much as possible from the TPad to eliminate some wieird interfeance or electrical short and this inlcudes any accessible DIMM's while still leaving enough RAM for minimal sysatem boot, if you can just reach POST then it seems your problems may be solved.
I
Still failingg,,,, if you have access to an ultrabay adapter, mount the new but unbootable disk into the ulotra Bay, power off the sytsem and drop the batteries but leave the BIOS battery alone
REmain unpowered for a few seoncs and to lfush remanants, the Intel Chip Set has gained sophistaicantion and has really nhice tigtht mini os of its own and can even be interaced with hypertmenail and some port commands.
It is unlikey the chipset is corrupt but it can retain last session info longer than you'd think and dropping all batteries is the reason by elimiatinng this variable.
Restart and the fialed disk inside slot 2 and w/o the boot disk and boot.ini I gave you, observe for any differences or progression versus before
If that still fails, then return here with details from your tests, ...but you get to a point where you realize you waste more time trying to repair something than just replacing it and unless there is software on this system you can't afford to lose and it has to be preserved in its state, then you could consider laying that existing image from your new but non starter onto a separaete locaiotn and erinstalling your pre3ferrred OS to migrate the data back and your best to merge the session state.
Another altrenative and aasuming you have the horsepower and free space, take that coy of ghost and lay it down onto a virtual machine, since Microsoft Virtual PC and VMWare emulate better than anytihing else,  it is possible to migrate a physical disk and array into a vhd and the transplated OS will never see a difference.
This is an emerging solution for tradiioanal users whoa re loathe to change when they find and manage to get a computer that works just the way they want ( can you blame them ?).  I volunteer at an assited living center and a violinist who had configured her 12 year old Windows95 laptop just the way she liked it and only went online about four times a year her box died and the center upgradedher to a lightweight x200 and she boots into windows XP and it aumoatmaily loads MS Virtual PC and her old Win95 system and music software and w/o er interaction so she can have her old computer on new deck and allowed to eat with metal utensils sicne she's calmer now.
If you can
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