I can now report that everything is back to normal.

Here is what MBRWizard said about NT/W2K/XP and drive restored using Drive Image/Ghost or the like.

"/Sort - It isn’t uncommon for the partition entries in the MBR to be unsorted after reinstalling Windows or restoring a Ghost image. This means that the partition order in the MBR won't match the order on disk. Normally this wasn’t a problem until Windows NT/2K/XP came along with its new boot loader, and the requirement that each partition entry in the boot.ini must point to the actual partition number. This option will sort the entries in the MBR to match their physical order on disk." - quoted from http://www.geocities.com/mbrwizard/r...ce.html?200624