Here’s an easy one – you may have encountered and solved it already, but let this be here… as a reminder.

If you ever tried to install the Windows Server 2012 R2 into a Hyper-V virtual machine by using the provided OEM installation media (in my case, from IBM), your installation may fail even before it started because the hardware you’re using (i.e. “virtual” hardware) is not the one the installation expects (which is “imprinted in the media itself”).

So, you get an error like this:

Solution here is kind of simple – IBM provided the little utility (just 5 KB) called Hyper-V-OEM-BIOS-V2.exe, which makes the virtual machine “produced by IBM” (actually, virtual machine BIOS gets updated to contain the IBM specific information, that the Windows installation is looking for, and which is the cause of this error).

After you run the utility (on your Hyper-V host), Windows installation using the OEM media proceeds as it should.

Other solution (actually a workaround) is to use the retail media for the virtual machine installation. In this case, you won’t get the error, and installation proceeds as it should right from the beginning.

IBM published a document explaining this issue, and the possible resolution/workaround, you can view it here.

As I’ve said – quick & easy (hope it helps)!

Cheers!