Ghost 14 restore requires working OS on C: ???

So XP SP3 gave me nothing but problems on two machines and I'm abandoning it and restoring from a backup I made just prior to installing it. 

 

I boot from the Ghost CD and start the restore.  At 99% it reports an error.  It seems my external drive has a bad habit of going off-line even though sleep has been disabled.  

 

Ok, so I try again.  But this time when I boot off the Ghost CD, I get 20+ popups titled SRELOADDRIVER.EXE with the contents of the dialog describing a corrupt file in the \system32 folder on C:, I think it was KERNEL32.DLL.  Well, no big surprise considering the previous restore had failed.  But since when does booting off the Ghost CD require a valid OS on C: in order to boot without error?   Fortunately after dismissing the dialog 20+ times I get the main menu and start another restore.