Norton Ghost 15.0 Not Working

Last week I purchased Norton Ghost 15.0 to avoid spending 8 hours of software installation and configuration on a laptop that required a hard disk replacement.  12 hours later I am regreting the purchase.  And we are not done the troubleshooting on the product. 

This morning on the tech support chat I was told to format the new drive, which I did for an hour.  Just now (8 hours later!) I was told that the format of the drive did not do anything.  The drive restore must be sent to unallocated space.  Which I did four hours ago, but now the troubleshooting steps require it to be done again.  I continue to spend hours doing this to avoid the 8 hours of reformat and reinstallation being added to the 12 hours already invested in Norton.  Half of yesterday and all of today has been spent alternately watching Norton Ghost run and then watching my computer blue screen itself to death. 

Six "restore from disk"s and four  repair Windows XP pro's and we are still nowhere.