"Inaccessible boot device" error on image restore

I routinely back up my hard drive image on to disks using Paragon's Drive Back-up utility. It works fine whenever I restore back on to the same pc.

Out of curiosity I tried restoring the image to a different PC just to see if it worked. The restore process wrote to the disk ok but on boot up I got a blue screen with an error message saying "Inaccessible boot device" .

Is there any way of getting this to work?

 

You'll need your XP CD for the Recovery Console....
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311724/en-us (this link only mentions Win2000 but it applies to WinXP also to a certain degree)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058/en-us (look for 'fixboot' and 'fixmbr')
Visit your hard drive makers web site; download and run their diagnostic on your hard drive to make sure it hasn't gone south on you... usually these tools have a repair option also....
Good luck!

hd2k

 

Thanks Hopperdave. I restored an image taken from the correct pc and it's all ok again so there can't be anything wrong with hardware. Presumably the image I used from the first pc contains invalid information about the hardware(?).

Anyway it's not something I'm going to investigate further. It was just an experiment to see if I could easily clone from one pc to another. If I have to do a lot of repair stuff it might be less hassle just to load the everything from scratch, although it seems a bit of a shame.

 

Generally speaking, if you clone one PC's hard drive and try to run it on a different PC with different hardware, you'll run into all sorts of problems; especially with Windows XP.....

 

Its never going to work, unless you "attempt" a repair over the image.

Windows XP cannot change ide/sata drivers on the fly; once they are installed for a certain hardware, they stay that way until reinstalled, or updated from within the OS. The only exception to this is if the motherboard hard drive controllers use the same drivers as the previous machine.

That--and its against the MS EULA to do such a thing.