XP OS backup Norton Ghost

Did you boot up after finishing the clone? After the clone completes you MUST remove one of the drives, in your case the dieing one. If you boot directly after the clone windows will boot but it will be sort of grabbing info from one drive and the other and essentially hosing one or both of drives installs. I made this mistake once before so I made sure I remembered every other time  
The first thing to try would be to only boot off the dieing disk. If that works, unhook the dieing disk, plug in the secondary disk and format it clean. Then try the clone again and remove the dieing drive right after the clone is done, don't let the machine get anywhere near loading windows.
If that doesn't work just boot off the windows cd and do a repair on your secondary drive when it is the ONLY one in the computer. That will force you to reinstall all those pesky windows updates but at least you will still have your apps and data.

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

Oh no I tried creating an image just today and it failed. I had no problem booting off either drives for a couple of weeks now. Just today I had the time to remove the dying drive and said to myself okay let me test this and boot of of the new drive that i cloned from the old.... and there it was...Now I have to hold my breath again and see if this thing can create another clone.... I was advised to try that in another post.. what repair do you speak of... the only one i know of is the second option with the installation disk where you press "R" but that only brings me to the command prompt to log into windows... i did that to try the fixmbr & fixboot neither worked where do i go to get to the other repair...

XP PRO

I can see from the system information that the pagefile.sys is coming from the c:\

The repair I'm thinking of is on a screen after the first. Just hit enter like you are doing a new install. On either the next screen or one soon after it will scan for/find your current windows install. On that screen, you get the choice of repair (i'm fairly sure it says repair) or esc to contine. Choose repair and it will just replace all the windows files and leave all of your stuff alone.

<A HREF="http://www.folken.net/myrig.htm" target="_new">My precious...</A>

Alright I figured that. I tried that got an error about setting up log files "fatal error" i tried that a couple of times resulting with the same error. So I guess im going to have to try and ghost the drive again and remove the old right after ghosting