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I recently did an upgrade of a server which involved upgrading the existing HP Smart Array controller card and hard drives.  We have an HP ML350G5 server that was using an E200i integrated smart array controller and 4 5.4k SATA drives in a RAID 5 array (I know, 5.4k drives…   it was actually a misconfigured order from HP).  At any rate, I upgrade to an P400 controller with 512MB of Battery Backed Write Cache (BBWC) and 7 15k SAS drives.

We did a full backup of the system using Acronis True Image server, upgrade the hardware, rebuilt the array and restored the backup (again using Acronis).  One option I noticed during the restore was the option to create a new disk signature or extract the existing signature from the backup file.  The default is to create a new disk signature, so we went with that a performed the restore.  An hour and a half later, the restore finished and everything looked good.  Everything except the Microsoft Office applications.  They for some reason wanted to reinstall and activate.  I let it run for about 10 minutes while it looked like it was trying to install, but it was hanging so we killed the process and looked around for some articles on what the issue might be.

I found a thread stating that creating a new disk signature during the restore could create reactivation issues with certain applications.  So we did the restore a second time, this time choosing to extract the disk signature from the image.  An hour and a half later (again), the restore looked good EXCEPT the MS Office applications tried to reinstall/reactivate again.

So back to the drawing board, I read through some additional troubleshooting threads and found some information on a similar issue and the fact removing a setup file from within the office install actually ended up solving the issue.

What I ended up doing was going to c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\OFFICE12 and removing the setup.exe file (I renamed it actually incase something didn’t work).   When I then went in and tried to run an Office application, it went through a quick install and fired right up.

I don’t exactly what the root cause was, but that was the fix and things have been working fine thus far.

Just thought I would through that out there and happy upgrading!