My HP iPAQ ran out of battery this morning. When I started it up, the memory was blank. When I tried to restore my files using Windows Mobile Device Center under Windows Vista, I got an annoying message saying that “Restore cannot be completed successfully. The selected backup file was created from a different type of mobile device.”

Aargh!

Fortunately, the kind people at http://www.filesaveas.com/pocketpcactivesync.html had the solution:

You’ll see this under a couple of circumstances: either you’ve recently done a software upgrade (a new release of the operating system / ROM upgrade) and are trying to restore a backup that applies to the older software operating system. More commonly, you’ll see this after having reset your machine, and the device is set to a different region to the region in use when it was backed up (it defaults to US English). Go to ‘Settings > System > Regional settings’, and switch to the appropriate language.

In my case, I had to set the language to English (UK) and then restore ran smoothly.

I hope this helps someone.