After several months of testing, confusing menus, impossible configurations, and frustration, I just uninstalled Ghost 14 completely, and deleted the 70gb of arcane backup files it had generated.

In its place, I just installed Macrium Reflect Free edition, which only makes partition image backups, but does include a very nice way to automagically create a boot CD with the restore program on it, so all you need to do to recover is boot to the CD and find the backup image. I'll test that when I buy a new drive and throw it into the laptop in a few months. Should be interesting.