I have several images taken from many machines with different configurations, motherboards, processors, etc... Sometimes I can get away with taking one of these images and putting it onto a new machine I get in to save time. When Win2k loads up, it just finds all this new hardware because its a whole new motherboard, video card, etc... However sometimes, you cannot get away with this as you will get a blue screen of death. The most common ones I get for Win2K when this process is done is, Inaccessible Boot Device... The confusing part to me is why this sometimes works and sometimes it does not. I have never been able to find the determining factor. I have placed pentium laptop images onto Athlon desktops believe it or not and had them work fine. Then I have put an image that is just a tad off like the motherboard model is just a little different from the machine it is going onto, and I get the blue screen. Ok so now my question is this. I have heard people say that if you take a machine and before you take an image of it, (I use Ghost) you go into device manager and remove all of the system devices, then take the image, then when you stick this image on the alien machine and boot it up, it will redetect all the hardware thus getting you around the blue screen of death. Does this method work? Right now, I have a guy who has his machine just the way he likes it with all of his programs, (15 GB worth) and he is saying it would take days to get his new machine configured like his old one. So what I want to do is take an image of his old machine to place on his new one. I just got done this process and I applied his old machines image to his new machine, and I get the blue screen of death so I am about to attempt the systems in device manager removal process to see if this works. Any tips or lessons learned would be of great help to me. In this case, the old machine contains an Athlon A7M266 mobo and I am placing its image onto a Tyan dual Athlon mobo with a SCSI interface. I know these are totally different hardware configs but if there is a way this can be done, I would love to know. Thanks everyone and sorry for the long post!

I have had success with the method you mentioned: removing all devices from device manager, shutting down the pc, and replacing motherboards. Unfortunately, I've only done it twice, and on WIN98 both times. It did work both times, and came out great at that. Good luck! Drexhex

win2k prosets a security id using numbers from hardware and devices sothat if the sid# does not match it thinks that hardware was stolen and blue screens you. If you use ghost get ghostwlk

Innacessable boot device is usually caused by the ATA100 hard drive drivers. If you strip these drivers from the OS before you make an image of the drive, it will most often fix the error. For some reason Win2k doesn't always play nice with ATA 100 drivers.

I use ghost quite a bit and used to run into this problem all the time. Microsoft has a tool which you should always run before cloning a PC. It removes all the hardware settings for you, and creates a unique SID. I'm getting ready to put an image of a Dell GX400 P4 system onto an older dell GX110. It will be the first time i've really tested sysprep. You basically just run sysprep. It will shut down your computer. Then when you clone the computer and apply the image to the 'alien PC' you will get a wizard the first time you boot asking for the machine name, tcp/ip settings, and so on. Here is some more info if you are interested http://www.win2000mag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=5047 You can download it here...... http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/downloads/tools/sysprep/license.asp. Hope this helps you out.

Hi, the problem you mentioned is the SCSI-Controller. Sometimes also the IDE-Controller if the target-system partition on the harddisk runs on the secondary IDE-Controller. I would also suggest using ghost in conjungtion with sysprep but the 1.1 version of sysprep, since this overcomes the SCSI / IDE -Problem. It's also advisable to deinstall the bridge-devices and most of the hardware dependent stuff. Although you might get some errors since sysprep doesn't runs through a whole install-process. If you encounter problems with PnP-ISA-Cards, run sysprep with parameter -pnp. Greets Alex