My Ghosted PC blue-screens while booting. What is the problem and how do I fix it?

Sometimes when you Ghost from one PC to another PC the hardware is different enough that the PC cannot recognize basic hardware devices like hard drives. The main scenarios in which this occurs are:

a) you are going from one HAL to another HAL. For example, if a single processor image is being installed on a dual processor PC or

b) the disk controllers are using a different set of device drivers. For example, a SCSI image is being installed on an IDE PC. Mind you, you can even get a blue screen going from IDE to IDE or SCSI to SCSI if the HDD device drivers are dissimilar enough.

SOLUTION: After Ghosting down the faulty image you can force Windows to re-evaluate the HAL by doing to following:
 

1. Boot the PC from the CD that matches the intended OS. For example, if the image is of Windows 2000 Server SP4, then boot the PC from a Windows 2000 Server SP4 CD.
2. At the first screen DO NOT select Repair (R). Instead select Install (ENTER). If you select Repair then Windows will attempt to repair the Windows boot files of the current installation, which will not help you one bit.
3. At the second screen accept the license agreement (F8).
4. At the third screen highlight the installation of Windows that is problematic and select Repair (R). Weird as it may seem, when you accept the second offer to repair what you are telling the install program to do is repair the entire installation, rather than just the boot files. The install program will then delete the current HAL and re-evaluate the HAL and re-run the Plug-and-Plug detection process to install all the correct drivers.
5. If you didn’t use the current service pack CD in step one, then you will need to re-apply the current service pack now. After that, I’d probably re-apply all the post service pack hotfixes as well.

Hope this helps.
Paul Eddington.

KB Keywords: BSOD, blue, screen, death, freeze, splat, crash, Ghost, image, HAL, hardware, abstraction, layer, copy, clone.