fragmented ghost ntfs recovery

I was tasked with upgrading our mailserver with some new 300gb drives (as a raid1 array). I didn’t want to have to work any crazy registry magic to get exchange to switch drives. The person who originally setup the machine setup two partitions, a 4gb OS partition and a 56gb exchange/programs partition. Both partitions were full and that tends to be a problem when mail for ~50 accounts floods in. I ghosted the 56gb partition over to the 300gb drive array. That went well, so I moved on to the 4gb partition and backed it up to a file on the 300gb drive. Once that was complete I proceeded to ghost that partition back over to the 60gb drive. About half way through that process I hit an error (25002). The error is caused by very fragmented ntfs partitions and older versions of ghost. After some panic, I created a clean ntfs partition and used ghost explorer to export all of the files from the ghost file. I didn’t expect it to work, but it did. Thinking about it now, I can’t see why it wouldn’t work. The windows, like any other os, is just a composition of files. So long as I didn’t change any hardware, things would "just work". I’m pretty sure I could manage a hardware change if need-be using an off-line registry editor to clean things up. While windows still isn’t quite as resilient as your standard linux distro, it’s not as brittle as I had believed. I hope this helps someone.