🚀 go-pugleaf

> But it didn't work for me. Some logical drive letters seemed to back up
> fine, others didn't. So I have a portion of the files backed up,
> but the hard drive won't boot - Linux Red Hat 9 complains that
> /boot has a 1-byte size difference compared to what is in the
> Master Boot Record. Whereas Windows XP boots up to the XP logo,
> but that's all it shows - it doesn't give me the normal password prompt.

Correct. If you restore the image of the SystemRoot disk of Windows, you must
either:

a) also restore the MBR, so that the new disk will have the same MBR Signature
and the SystemRoot partition will have the same offset

or

b) mount the SYSTEM registry of _this restored Windows image_ on some another
computer and patch the MountedDevices value manually, so it will be the same
drive letter as the original disk was.

Windows assigns the drive letters on "mountdev ID" basis, and the "mountdev ID"
of the usual disk partition on an MBR disk is - 12bytes, 4byte MBR signature of
the disk, then 8byte partition offset (in bytes IIRC).

The HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices registry contains the table of the drive letters
in the form of:

\DosDevices\C: REG_BINARY: mountdev ID
\DosDevices\D: REG_BINARY: mountdev ID
\DosDevices\E: REG_BINARY: mountdev ID

and so on.

If you will not patch this in the new restored Windows disk - then it will boot
and will assign itself as, for instance, T:, while all pathnames of services,
Windows user mode components and COM objects (including the shell components) -
are starting from C:\. This is a major failure, the system seems to be up, but
you cannot log on.

-- 
Maxim Shatskih, Windows DDK MVP
StorageCraft Corporation
maxim@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com