I installed XP on a system booting from a Mylex 1164P SCSI raid controller. I made an image of that system with Norton Ghost V11.5 to a file. I then took that file and restored it onto a system with an Adaptec SCSI controller and it booted just fine on that system and the one next to it, similar but with different chip-sets on the motherboard.

I was sort of surprised that it worked, but it did. Cool. Then I restored that system to a system with an AMI raid controller. It wouldn't boot, it would just reset a few seconds after the XP splash screen came up. Rats.

If I tried to restart it manually, depending on which way you'd do it, it would hang when processing either isapnp.sys or gagp30kx.sys the ISA bus and Via k8 mobo chip-set drivers respectively.

It didn't surprise me that an image of an xp installation that said "Mylex 1164 raid controller" in Device Manager wouldn't boot on a system with an AMI raid controller instead.

So I booted up that disk image on a system with only an Adaptec SCSI controller, restarted it twice which makes xp happy. Then I added the AMI raid controller which it recognized and configured the drive and asked me to reboot, which I did, twice.

Then I looked in device manager to see that, yes, there's both an AMI raid controller and Adaptec SCSI controller and I uninstalled the Adaptec in device manager leaving only the AMI raid controller.

Frozen in time and wanting to reboot, I now took a disk image of the system in this state, kept a copy as a file and imaged this to the raid array.

Then I powered down, removed the Adaptec card and powered up thinking it would boot.

It did. This is the first time I've ever outsmarted windows with logic. It never seemed to respond well to it.