Hi everyone,
I work in a small organization with computers and they recently instructed us to reformat computers using a Ghost image that was created. On some computers the image works fine and on others it gives me a black screen on bootup and this error message:

Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.

Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.

Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.

Any ideas as to why this happens and how it can be fixed? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Well the Ghost image would only work on the HDD in the computer it it was originally created from, or HDDs on other computers that are totally identical to that computer.

That's not necessarily true, it depends on the Hardware architecture. If the computers share the same or similar chipsets then there are ways to get an image to work on multiple computers. At our corporation me have multi-platform images that work on any computer, laptop or tablet in the company. But that's another story

There are 2 things to try in order to try and get your image to work on the problem computers.

1. Boot from XP CD into recovery Console, select your windows installation, enter your admin password then perform the following commands

fixboot c:
fixmbr c:
chkdsk /p

It may be necessary to confirm one or more of these commands. Once this has been done type exit, then remove the XP CD while the computer is rebooting.

If that does not solve the problem then:

2. Perform a repair installation of Windows XP. This reloads the device drivers etc and rewrites the system files but leaves your installed applications intact. It's important that you choose repair installation rather than performing an "overwrite" installation, as the latter will completely rewrite the registry etc and you will need to reinstall all the applications again.

The other (longer) option is to create a multi-platform image from one of the computers that worked and then reimage the other computers with this. To do this:

Restart the computer into safemode and then enter device manager. Starting from the bottom of the list uninstall every device that has an uninstall option. Somce devices will not let you uninstall them. Some devices are required to be left, I can't recall what they are off hand, but you'll know straight away when you find one of them as the computer will stop responding If that happens, write down that device, restart into safemode again and start again missing out that device. Repeat this untill all "safe" devices have been uninstalled, run sysprep against this computer then take a ghost image.