Hard drive replacement/backup

Hi folks-

This is going to be nice and long. I'm having a nasty issue with my machine
at the moment. If anyone can tell me where I went wrong,

This is a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 running Vista Business SP1. A few weeks ago I
noticed that my hard drive was failing a SMART test, so Lenovo replaced it
under warranty. I tried to back up my data using Nero 7's BackItUp version 2
by creating a bootable DVD and then creating image files from that. The
problem is that when I tried to back up my entire drive, it backs up about
150 MB, then sits at a stage that says "writing short lead-out" for about 10
minutes before the backup fails. And I can't save the log file because the
Nero software doesn't recognize my hard drive as a valid location to store
it. The same behavior occurs in Nero 8, which I downloaded as a trial.

Earlier today I realized that if I backed up only the primary partition (not
including the Lenovo system partition), the backup would succeed. So I did
that, using Nero 8. I then swapped out the hard drives and ran the Lenovo
recovery software so it would recreate the appropriate partitions. When that
was done, I booted back into Nero to restore the backup. I got a nasty error
at the beginning--I don't remember exactly what it said, but it was something
along the lines of the beginning sector doesn't line up exactly and that I
shouldn't proceed unless I know what I was doing. Needless to say, I
proceeded to restore the backup. Unfortunately, after rebooting, all I got
was a flashing white line. When I try to boot into the Lenovo software using
the hotkey, I get the same result.

I still have the old disk, so I can make new backups if needed. Does anyone
have any suggestions on how to make this work? Obviously, getting the data
moved over is the most important part, but it would be nice to have the
Lenovo recovery stuff available as well.

Thanks

Eric