But no, we have a complete image of the drive in question, it's just that the original drive cannot be used, so we have to place the image onto a new physical drive of identical specs. XP copy protection refuses to boot from the new drive. Dead in the water. Time to reinstall.
Refuses to boot how? Simply putting the files there isn't good enough, just like slapping a /boot partition somewhere isn't enough to boot Linux. Restore the files, then run the XP CD in repair mode, and tell it to repair the boot sector.