Greetings,

This is my first post, thanks in advance for your advice and help. By the way, if someone out there is an expert on this, I may be interested in paying you to consult on this problem.

I have been reading this forum for the last 5 days in a frustrating attempt to identify what is going wrong.

First some background:

I build a real time flight simulator used to teach Astronomy. It is based on Windows XP pro running on two Shuttle PCs with a 200Gig drive.
Each drive has two partitions, C: &  S:

I have been using Ghost 9 for some time with reasonable success to both backup our various office PCs and to build the simulator from a known working image stored on an external USB drive (this saves considerable time).

Please note, each PC has its own legal OEM copy of Windows XP pro.

Last week we attempted to build a new system. Starting with a fresh hard drive I booted up the PC from the Ghost 9 CD and initiated a full restore using the “system index file”.

I believe this had worked in the past, although it might have required a phone call to Microsoft for an activation key (too many components changed at once ?). As I recall, it may have also been necessary to pre format and pre partition the destination drive by doing a fresh install of Windows then using Partition Magic 8.

Back to this week:
After considerable time copying the image to the new hard drive, the PC was rebooted but only made it as far as the screen warning that "Windows had a problem booting" and I should boot into Safe mode. This still failed and returned to the Shuttle boot page (where you enter the setup page).

After reading many of your posts and trying a multitude of approaches I am still unable to make this work.

As a test I made a simple copy of a working C: drive to a secondary drive. After it was finished, I disconnected the original C: drive and booted up the copy. It got as far as the blue Windows page with a working mouse… then stopped.

A more successful attempt was to install Windows from scratch, create the partition, then copy files and folders from our simulator image. This almost worked although I believed it wanted me to call Micro Soft for a key.

One last clue:
When I use Norton Disk Doctor to see what drives are attached, there is a Z: drive called MS-ramdrive, I have no idea what this is.

By the way, I did read the article on Sysprep tool, it seems as much work as just building the simulator from scratch (a three day effort).

So… where do I start? I used to think I understood this stuff, I am amazed at how much effort is spent by Microsoft to keep you from protecting your own legal data.

Thanks !!!!

Yes,

I am building a "clone" of the simulator we built in the past.  The source image came off of a unit we built last year and keep updating. The image was made two weeks ago.

Somehow we managed to pull this off three times before.

I will look into the repair install technique, in the meantime what do you thinks is going on?

My other concern is protecting the existing systems; if a unit fails I need to be able to rebuild it quickly. It would be great if I had a spare "bootable" drive on a shelf that we could just pop in. Or we could include an external drive as part of the package with detailed instructions on how to recover.

I gather that Windows does not want you to upgrade motherboards easily.

Thanks for your help...