I think I had this problem as well when restoring from a Windows 2000 server image onto a system that had a new hard drive.
Basically, what you need to do is do a complete, fresh windows 2000 advanced server installation to the target partition.
Then (yes, its true!) restore your image over the top of it.
Your system will then log in just fine.
Must work by writing some sort of signature onto the hard drive's partition table, or something.... I don't know exactly, I just know that that's how I solved the problem.