Vista 32-bit/64-bit snapshots restored to a different drive fail to boot and solution

Hi all,
I am using FDISR to make snapshots of various versions of Vista (i.e. SP1, 32bit vs 64bit) to archives on another disk. Prior to setting up all those snapshots in FDISR, I have also saved an image of a basic Vista or XP installation on the primary HDD. In my testing, I decided to simulate a scenario of a primary HDD failure and replacement with a new drive.

If I were to bring up the new disk (of a different size in my case) by restoring an image to it (or simply reinstall a new copy of Vista/XP), followed by restoration of the Vista snapshots (XP snapshots are fine), I am seeing that those snapshots can't be booted. Vista Boot Manager will complain of a "missing or corrupted" winloader.exe. Fortunately, this can be fixed if you reboot with the Vista Install DVD and select the repair option.

However, I was wondering if there was a better way to fix this and after some research and experimentation, I think the problem is because when a snapshot is saved from one drive and restored into another, the BCD database of that snapshot isn't updated correctly. Pointers to the old drive still exist and Vista fails to boot because of this.

Although this problem probably exists too when restoring an OS image to a new drive, I believe my imaging application, Acronis True Image 11, takes care of fixing the BCD.

One possible solution that I found is that, if the following commands are first entered to set the boot and OS device types in the BCD database to be "boot", then the Vista OS will be disk-agnostic.

Code:

bcdedit /set {current} osdevice boot
bcdedit /set {current} device boot
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot
bcdedit /set {memdiag} device boot

I got this from information from reading this guide:
http://www.multibooters.co.uk/cloning.html

After setting the BCD correctly, the snapshot of Vista can then be archived. When restoring to a new drive, it should work without needing to use the Vista DVD to repair it. I'm curious if this is a problem that affects other people? Obviously, if you upgrade your motherboard and CPU as well, then it probably isn't a good idea to reuse the old snapshots

Regards,
Cheese

P.S. I just realized that this is similar to the problem highlighted here (which I didn't find in my earlier forum searches):

 

Fri: Oh yes. Many people have this problem. I thought TI would fix it if you did things in a specific sequence. I'm hoping your workaround does it for me. That will be tried tomorrow.

Sat: So I tried and it did not work for me. What it did was start to load recovery files, which unfortunately on my system are a reimage. I suspect on a normal installation this might work; as it did for you.