Norton Ghost - NTLDR is missing, Win2000 won't boot from disk -- PCTECH

The specific problem is contained in the last paragraph.  Skip to that if 
you don't care to read the story of how I got there.  :-)

Purchased Norton Ghost 9.0 a few days ago to help with replacing a failing 
12GB drive (starting to run check disk on reboot many times, taking about 
40 minutes, and finding several bad clusters each time) in my ThinkPad 
A20m with a new one (can't buy 12GB laptop drives anymore, so bought a 
40GB drive, Seagate, half the price IBM wanted for the same thing). Before 
purchasing Ghost 9.0 I called Symantec, went through the menu options and 
selected sales, and said I wanted a specific question answered before I 
put out my money to purchase it.  I was forwarded to some Tech Support, 
that seemed to me to be in India (no offence intended, but very difficult 
to understand the gentleman, and he also seemed to have difficulty 
understanding me).  Anyway, my specific question was "Will Ghost 9.0 let 
me save off my entire 12GB hard drive in my ThinkPad to a network drive or 
DVD, replace my 12GB HDD with a 40GB HDD, and reload the entire HDD?". 
After putting me on hold a few times, he came back with the answer "yes". 
So, I purchased it (online download of a 190MB file because it isn't in 
the stored yet, apparently it was only released a few weeks ago to replace 
Ghost 2003).  Had to download it a second time as there was an error 
unzipping it the first time.  Burned it to CD and installed it.  Ran my 
backup (to another PC on my Home LAN).  Of course, it failed the first 
time after running for a few hours.  Finally finished, took around 7 hours 
(I was using about 11GB of  my 12GB drive, backing up over a 100Mbps LAN 
with no other traffic).

Restoring via booting from the Norton Ghost 9.0 CD I finally managed to 
get it to map a network drive (that seems very flaky) and restored in just 
under 4.5 hours (again, failed the first attempt).  Tried to boot the PC, 
failed with "NTLDR is missing".  Searched with Google and found several 
references (yes the drive does have ntldr in the root directory, as well 
as ntdetect.com and a good boot.ini).  The first time I tried the disk was 
new and unformatted, I tried this again after re-formatting, and 
partitioning the drive so C: was less than 32GB (it's FAT32), I set C: 
partition at 30GB.  Still failed to boot from disk.  Tried Symantec online 
support for Ghost 9.0, no references to NTLDR at all - not much of 
anything actually.  Tried to get Symantec tech support at 800-745-5062 - 
what a joke that is.  Follow the prompts and they recite options for all 
the older versions of Ghost, but no Ghost 9.0 - so I tried the next 
version, Ghost 2003.  That routed me to total silence for over 30 minutes 
before I hung up.  Tried to get their customer service and decided to 
select the option for a refund (as I was pretty annoyed with them at this 
time) and after going through the phone maze they give you a number, I 
called the number, it's no longer in service.  After over an hour on the 
phone I finally got a human by selecting options for sales, and explained 
my story.  He checked with a supervisor and said they would look into the 
problems with the support line, and why there was no option for support 
for Ghost 9.0 - so I asked them to call me back and let me know when the 
support phone problem was fixed and I'd try again.  No call back after 9 
hours.

Investigating things via Google some more I came up with options for 
trying the Windows 2000 Recovery Console, and trying fixboot or fixmbr. 
Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt.

Where am I at now ?  Well I created a Win2000 boot diskette (ntldr, 
ntdetect.com & boot.ini copied from a Win 2000 Pro PC (mine actually, I 
put the "dying" disk back in for a while) after a full format of the 
diskette on my Win2000 Pro PC.  If I leave the diskette in the drive when 
I start my ThinkPad Windows boots up completely, EVERYTHING is on my hard 
drive, and EVERYTHING works (and the 3 files on the diskette are in my 
root drive on C: - hidden system files).  I just can NOT get the stupid 
HDD to boot up from disk.  The only thing "unusual" about my set-up is 
that the ThinkPad was originally Windows 98SE and I updated it a few years 
ago to Win2000 Pro.  The Windows root directory is named WINDOWS and not 
WINNT.  Any clues ?

...Neil