CentOS 5 :: How To Restore From Image Backup

I have 4 different servers with exactly the same hardware. I set up one of them to have a centos install with all the basic stuff I'd like running on each one. I then created an image of the harddrive with the operating system, and stored it on an external drive. I used dd to copy the external image to one of the new machines. It worked fine, everything booted up as normal and with a few tweaks everything was great. The problem is that the drive is rather large (500gb) and it takes days for dd to copy it over. I decided to try a different route, I booted to a usb (using the linux distro on the ultimate boot cd pre-loaded with gparted). There are two partitions on the external drive, a small (100mb) partition which can easily be copied over with gparted, and the larger 480+gb lvm partition.

Gparted doesn't support lvm, so I used fdisk to create a new lvm partition on the new machine, and then pvcreate/vgcreate/lvcreate to re-create the same volume groups/logical volumes that are in the image on the external harddrive. I rsync'ed all the information over from LogVol00, and made the same swap partition LogVol01 (which took WAY less time). I disconnected the hard drive and renamed the volume group to VolGroup00 (initiall I named it differently, since linux doesn't like having the volume groups named the same). I can mount the LogVol00 partition and see all the files as they should be. But when I try and boot up, it doesn't even go to grub, I just end up with a blank screen and blinking cursor. How to make the drive bootable? Alternatively, a better strategy than using dd to restore this image??