Can't restore after HD replacement

I have a Sony Vaio S150 that had to be returned to manufacturer to replace a faulty hard drive. I am trying to restore from an Acronis image (8.0) I made in August (image was saved on a WD USB drive). I know the image is good, since I had the occasion to restore about a month before the drive crashed. Now the system has been returned with the new drive and when I attempt to reboot after a successful restore, I get the following:

"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration
problem. Could not read from the selected boot path and disk hardware."

Fortunately, I had backed up the disk when the computer returned from the repair depot. I can successfully restore that new image as returned from repair, but not the one made with all our software and configurations. We have been relying on the Acronis backup working for disaster recovery strategy (workstation and server versions) for both workstations and our servers for occasions JUST LIKE THIS where we lose a hard drive. It has worked in the past, why not now?

Any insight is appreciated....

 

See if this helps:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314477

 

There were a number of Google hits on your exact quote - most point to Boot.ini

 

If none of the above works and since you have both the images from when you sent the computer in and when you got it back, use the TI boot CD to prepare the drive and then try the restore again.

 

Thanks for the suggestions. I was surprised to see the first recommendations as they are ones I would anticipate using to recover a crashed or corrupted system... I would have expected an 'image copy' of a working disk to be just that, an image copy that could be restored onto a replacement drive. I mean, that would constitute true disaster recovery.

I could understand encountering the problem if trying to restore to a system with differing hardware (mother board, driver conflicts, unsupported hardware, etc), but the replaced drive is the only change in the computer. I suppose the only time TI can be considered 'disaster recovery' software is in the event of corruption, virus infection, human error.... certainly a dissapointment for us as a solution for disk failure/recovery.

 

The replacement drive probably has a different partition structure (MBR) from the original drive.
The boot.ini file is pointing to the original partition number, if the MBR is different then after doing a single partition restore there is a conflict between them.
You would have needed to image the whole disk (to have included the MBR in the image) and then restored that whole disk image.