XP booting "sensitivity"

[Quantax]

It seems that every time I restore a ghosted image onto a hard drive partition, I end up having to do a "repair install" of Win XP. And the same thing happened again just today when I "transplanted" a motherboard + all the accompanying components(drives, peripherals, cards, etc.)from one case to another.

Does this point to an usual sensitivity to the booting files(like boot.ini)or am I doing something wrong?

[Quantax]

Since that last post, XP on the "transplanted" PC is now behaving itself and doesn't have the booting problem I thought it did(or else it did but quickly corrected itself).

[Paul Komski]

You don't say which imaging program was used but the most common reasons for a failure to boot after re-imaging is that somehow or other (for whatever reason) the references in boot.ini no longer actually reference the correct partition or folder or else either the partition boot or master boot sectors were corrupted in some way.

The different imaging software does work slightly differently and some are better at updating the boot sectors and boot files appropriately than others. I have only had problems with Drive Image when I have restored something inappropriately - eg:- an image taken from partition 5 but restored onto partition 2 or had something like a power cut during the restoration.

Another little glitch, for example, can occur if the active partition gets changed or hidden - the latter can occur when restoring Win9X into what was not formerly the active partiton - and which will be hidden by this process.