So I was messing about at home on cold rainy weekend and thought to myself, if my DC had a catastrophic failure, could I restore from back-up? So I took the back (18 hours old) and installed a new machine with 2003 RC2 SP2 and tried to restore, which worked fine, but after the restart I was stuck in "Activate windows" loop. I tried again, this time activating the target O/S first, but still no start.

I've done the same test on SBS 2003 and it worked fine, but not RC2. I tried using the methodology in Microsoft knowledge base 312295 but this conditions did not match and the objects referenced did not exist. It's not a major, but I'd like to know what this problem is, just in case I actually really had to do this.