if you use the -fni switch in ghost 8 (possibly earlier but this is the oldest i've treid) and later it works but you can't go from an IDE to SATA drive or vice versa.  alternatively, i've heard the -noide switch also works, though haven't tried it.

on some machines, dell's i remember specifically have issues, with controller by default being set in native mode.  You have to go into BIOS and change to combo mode. 

ghost is one of those wacky kinds of programs where the specifc setup may need some tweaking to work correctly. If you can't get it going with either the -nfi or -noide switches, post back here, but in short, yet, you can get ghost to boot from floppy/cd and burn an image of an SATA drive to optical disk.