Friggin' Symantec Ghost...

Using Vista Business on Dell XPS M1710 laptop...

OK, so, against my better judgement (knowing what Symantec does to machines it's installed on) I bought and installed Ghost 12.0 on my laptop because I need a) backups that take less than 7 hours to back up my hard drive (WD Backup currently), and b) a way to create clean images of my drive occassionally.

Well, since installing the hard disk won't boot by itself anymore. I get one quick tick on the LED and that's it. The only way to get it to boot it to enter the boot menu at POST and select the HDD option.

Thoughts? Ideas? Any suggestions welcome at this point. I'd rather not restore from the original image that came with the machine, but...

Thanks!
Jack