Although this is an old post I found it interesting.

I have several versions of IBM hardware LT's and have been been suffering slow Ghost backups / restores using USB drives.

Long story short - ghost with -nousb option is correct for some of them. Disabling USB support in BIOS is right for others.

Took me a while to figure this out but I found I needed no magic drivers or addtional software.

Just tweak the BIOS if necessary or use the -nousb ghost switch as needed.