Cannot restore from a Windows 7 drive image

[mkrobson]

I recently encountered a problem on my PC which completely foxed me and I still don't know the answer.

The problem arose when I changed the hard drive from which I load Windows 7 Home Premium. (I also have a second internal drive with two partitions - one for files and the other for drive images.)

I use Acronis True Image Home 2011 on a regular basis although I much more frequently rely these days on Windows 7 system images which have always worked a treat for me. As someone who regularly tries out new pieces of software or changes settings on an experimental basis I need to be able to restore my system to it's previous working State. For the purposes of the disk change exercise I was aware that I needed to rely on Acronis True Image and did so.

I've done this sort of Windows disk upgrade before without a problem and sure enough it worked on this occasion and I was able to load and run Windows 7 as before. Windows 7 spotted the new drive and all worked fine.

BUT I lost the ability to subsequently restore my system from any Windows 7 system images which I subsequently took. It was the same whether I used the F8 key at startup or starting using a Windows 7 boot CD. Every time I got the following message:

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause.
Status: 0xc000000e
The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.

I tried everything I know but could not overcome it. EasyBCD seemed to show a normal and correct boot sequence.

I did find a way out but only by re-installing Windows 7 taking the option to keep my programs and settings. It took a very long time to run but worked well with only a few program glitches which I was able to overcome. Now I can restore from Windows 7 images using the F8 key at startup.

Where did the problem lie and was there another and easier way to overcome my problem? Does anyone know?