Oh yeah, I have this customer that has 2 386sx machines running 2 CNC machines. He has some sort of DOS OS. He got hit by lightening. It only fried his power supply. He has to use the exact same hardware, video card, motherboard...etc. There are only the drivers for what came with the original. I told him he should start looking on ebay for the mainboard and video, super i/o cards. I figure they are from around 1993. He hasn't though. He said the company has an upgrade, sounds like yours,,, maybe he is going to get that...who knows. I gave up trying to figure out my customers a long time ago. anyway the network nodes part sounds like Novell netware.
When you clone with ghost, do you clone to a cd or dvd, try hanging another HD on the cable and cloning directly to that. What I would recommend is diconnecting the cdrom or whatever on the second ide channel with nothing else. they might be employing some kind of copy protection to make it not copy right.
I would also look around the net for machinists forums or cnc forums that would have ppl that have done what you are trying to do.