Trying to figure out the issue with this...

System is a Pentium III 1.2Ghz computer. Attempting to boot off of a Ghost Image Disc and the Ghost Image Disc will not boot. Other discs boot fine such as an older Linux Mint 9 LTS CD. BIOS on this Pentium III has USB CD ROM support for Boot Order and its #1 on the list, and boots Linux Mint 9 LTS without any issues with the external USB CD-ROM.

Other sites have RUN into same issue and engineering claims that you need to use a specific external CD-ROM to boot the Ghost Image which is the cure, but they haven't shared the specifics as to why this is the case with this.

I asked engineering for a FTP LINK to download the image and burn the ISO image using the external USB CD-RW/DVD IOMEGA drive and the CD-R disc burned with this drive also will not boot. So it doesn't appear to be a pairing between the media and the drive in which the media was burned with.

The checksum on the image checks out ok on the burn according to engineering.

The solution to this has been to use or borrow from another site an IOMEGA USB CD_ROM drive as for this image will boot without problems with that specific model drive, but no other drives.

Looking at the CD-R that is burned you can SEE the Ghost.GHO file and I tried a trick in which I booted off of the Ghost 2003 original software disc and then navigated to D:\support\ghost.exe and launched Ghost and then just before pointing to the image to use I'd swap the discs and place the image disc into the drive and tell it to push the Ghost image to the system, and this appeared to work correctly as for Ghost did not error out, but upon boot of the HDD the Windows XP displayed issues with broken profile which normally automatically logs on and it defaults to default profile and then errors out with Windows Key Activation expired, but no ability to get past a blue desktop screen with nothing else displayed except for error message of windows activation broken. Figured maybe its because it needs to be activated within 30 days from installation date of the original build. The Date on the image file was Dec 12, 2014, so I rolled the BIOS date/time back to Dec 13, 2014 and pushed the image to the drive clean again. Ended up with same results so its not a activation 30 day timeout of XP. Found out that the Ghost image was created with Ghost 7.5 Corporate Edition and I was using Ghost 2003 to try to push image to the HDD. Looked up on Symantec website to see if 2003 supports 7.5 and it does.

I finally got the specific model IOMEGA USB CD-ROM and was able to boot off the same disc's that wouldn't boot with any other drives and successfully push the image to the HDD and no user profile or windows activation problems.

So the question I have is what makes the Ghost image on the CD-R CD-ROM specific?.. when I can take the ISO of this same image and burn it using a different drive and use that same different drive that was used to burn the disc to try to boot it and it would not boot, but other discs such as Linux Mint 9 LTS booted and ran perfectly fine with this drive with this Pentium III 1.2 Ghz system. Additional info is that the disc was tested on a newer 1 year old computer to see if Ghost would boot on the disc and it also will not boot on a totally different computer so its not an issue with the Pentium III hardware. Its almost like Ghost 2003 wrote a boot instruction to this CD-R that only WORKS with this specific external CD-ROM drive and no others, yet I can find no info on google in reference to this, but it appears to be that way since this specific IOMEGA CD-ROM when used with the Ghost image disc works flawless. 

I have been using Ghost of different versions, mostly 2003 for years for XP and older OS's and the only problem I ever ran into similar to this was when I burned a backup of a system, and then upgraded to a CD-RW/DVD ROM from CD-RW ROM and a year later went to install clean image back to system and the disc would not boot. I had to put the original LG CD-RW drive back into the system to install its image as for the Philips CD-RW/DVD combo drive didn't work with the image disc. It appeared that the LG CD-RW drive burned the disc with possibly an offset in the laser track that the CD-RW/DVD ROM wasn't able to read, similar to an issue many many years prior with Floppy Disks written to with a NEC drive and not readable on a Panasonic  floppy drive because of an offset in the location in which the data was written to the tracks on the floppy platter. For the fact that I downloaded the ISO of the image and burned a fresh copy using the same drive that it was to be used for booting off of the disc, I figured if it was a track offset that this would be cured, but it still has the same issue, so its not a track offset, but has to be some instruction that ghost has at the boot instruction that wont read with any drives other than the specific drive that was used to create the master image before it was mass produced for all sites and distributed as UPGRADE media for system upgrade for systems nationally.You just melted my brain trying to remember my fave fallback source for Ghost info...

Here Ya Go Bud...