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. (more…)