I have already ruled out my Memorex CD-RW itself as being the cause of freezups when attempting to create a ghosted image of my hard drive.
The reason is that this CD burner worked created a perfect ghosted image on another PC I have. I also replaced the ribbon cable and in the Device Manager made certain that the optical drives are set for DMA mode. Then a DVD RAM drive I have also froze up while I was watching a movie about half way through.

So could this suggest a defective IDE controller channel and if so would I fix by acquiring and installing a new PCI controller card?

Have you tried removing/reinstalling your motherboard drivers?

No, I would think that if this is the ONLY problem I'm experiencing on this PC, that the mobo drivers would be fine.

But just in case, how does one go about removing them?

Originally posted by Quantax
But just in case, how does one go about removing them?
In safe mode under Device Manager.
I would remove all physical CD drives and reboot normally.

would I fix by acquiring and installing a new PCI controller card?
As a last resort, I would give this a shot. I would just add the CD drives and leave the hard drive on the MB IDE.

So could this suggest a defective IDE controller channel and if so would I fix by acquiring and installing a new PCI controller card?

Could be, but lets eliminate the simple things first.

Have you tried another ribbon cable? They can go faulty without warning, and give exactly the results you are now getting.

What shows up in Control Panel>device manager? Are the optical drives shown?
Are both the IDE ports shown, with no yellow or red markings?

Thanks to all who have replied so far.

Since the problem is now occurring on both of my PC's and these CD-RW drives are fairly new and I went to the Symantec website since this is a Ghost related issue, I'm now of the opinion that this problem is most likely due to the CD's themselves. They're CD-RW's which may have reached the point of no longer being useful.

Ghost can have problems with some images, especially if they have been created on different machines.
I run Ghost quite regularly (on XP Pro) The one thing you need to make sure of is that there is nothing trying to manage the hard disk (such as norton undelete) and that the boot sequence isn't going to look for oddball devices first.
I don't clone to cds though - I clone directly to a new disk (in removable caddies) as there were more errors when trying to clone to cd.