The following is only a hypothetical situation and may or may not have actually happened:
You do a P2V of a HP StorageWorks NAS b2000. It goes well, no errors to report. You hook up the VMDKs to your new virtual server, and crank up your new server. You cross your fingers as you click the “Open Console” button. You sigh in relief looking at the “Ctrl+Alt+Del” logon screen of your former physical server.
But, what’s this?
“The server you are running cannot run StorageWorks NAS software properly. You may be in violation of your license agreement. Please contact HP support immediately if you think this message is displayed in error. The server will Blue Screen in one minute.”
You don’t believe it would actually blue screen your file server, what would be madness! A few seconds later, it proves you wrong. Oh no! What to do?
I have a few hints:
There is probably a service that is running a “check” for the physical hardware. Newer appliance servers may even have more than one check to disable, I am unable to verify. You need to find the service(s). You can’t disable them, or stop them from starting in the Services MMC, even in safe mode.
You have to be more aggressive. You should probably delete the executable file that the service runs, using a BartPE disk if you have to. The service will not be able to start up anymore and you will have freed your appliance from its physical prison!
The service is the ROM service.
Files involved are C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ROMCHECK.DLL
and C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ROMCHECKSERVICE.EXE
HP has a patch to fix this problem with updated versions of the files.
Problem usually occurs after upgrading to Windows 2003 SP1 or 2, and is a known “issue” on the HP website.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=es&cc=es&taskId=110&prodSeriesId=376776&prodTypeId=12169&objectID=c00616839