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There isn't any one single cause; unfortunately it's a really badly-written error message, but it actually comes from the FAT filesystem code which is complaining that what it's looking at seems to be NTFS rather than FAT.

Why it gets into trying the FAT filesystem code depends on a lot of other factors; it could be because the MBR has the wrong code for the partition (which is type 7 for NTFS), or it could be because it's a type 7 partition but it already tried mounting it as NTFS and it decided it probably wasn't. Or maybe something else, it's hard to tell.

It's impossible to say which situation applies without seeing dumps of the MBR and of the first sector of the NTFS partitions, and of course Ghost 2003 is now pretty long in the tooth and the newer versions of the code have had all this changed around since then (largely as a result of Dell hidden utility partitions moving from FAT to NTFS, which confused the filesystem identification picture some more).

I've personally never seen this error, it's pretty rare, and the few cases that were ever actually reported to us it tended to be difficult to get the dumps of the relevant sectors or discover what lead to them being the way they were, so it's hard to give any solid advice on working around it. Using something like MBRWizard seems reasonably as a first attempt though, and although I've never had any cause to use it some other folks here speak about it positively and I'd say it's the best bet of the three options you present.

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It's very possible, your corporate admins are likely to use some kind of special deployment tools like the corporate version of Ghost, Altiris RapidDeploy or perhaps something else. So, perhaps something about the process they used has lead to this.

Whatever tools they use, this is a good chance to narrow down the process that leads to this happening - and that's actually the most important thing we need to learn to get the underlying problem fixed. Since the problem is so rare, it's not something our QA folks are going to come across with their testing so would be nice to learn more.

So if you don't mind asking them how they deployed your laptop it'd be useful information. Lots of company IT folks are sensitive about this kind of thing, so if they want it to be private, it can be arranged.