“At least one service or driver failed during system startup” after P2V-ing an HP ProLiant Server

One of issues I’ve come across over the past few years when virtualizing HP ProLiant servers was that I would continuously get the message:

At least one service or driver failed during system startup

… upon restarting the server. I didn’t have a blog back when I originally encountered this error so now that I do, I thought it would be worth while to write a post about it.

Problem

After using vCenter Converter to virtualize an HP server, you proceed with doing the cleanup of uninstalling the HP applications as well as removing hidden devices but even after you’ve completed all the tasks, you still receive the message:

At least one service or driver failed during system startup

… when you restart the server. Reviewing the event logs you see:

The problem here is the HP ProLiant System Shutdown Service which doesn’t get removed when you uninstall all the applications.

Solution

The easiest way to prevent this from happening is to either change the service’s startup to disabled:

OR

Remove the service from the registry.