Salmon Day

A Salmon Day is when you swim upstream all day, and still get screwed and die in the end. 

Well it has certainly been one of those.  Not least of all because I just accidentally shut down the Internet session that had the previous version of this post on.

I sat down at my desk in my home office this morning, and attempted to start my trusty SAP laptop, which managed to get as far as the desktop, but then completely failed to proceed, as they say about Rolls-Royces.  An error message came up saying that an application called lsass.exe had caused some kind of internal memory error, and the system wouldn't go any further than that.

The application concerned turns out to have something to do with logging onto the Windows network, and the fact that it was an IO issue, initially made me suspect either the memory or the hard drive, but a bit of fiddling with those proved that both were in fact intact.  So the next obvious thing to do was to go and start googling.  This turned up an interesting fact, which is that there is a Windows process called lsass.exe and a virus called Isass.exe.  Surely, you would think they are the same thing, but in fact the two names are different, as you can see if I now type them in capitals, LSASS.EXE and ISASS.EXE, with the second one which is the virus, using a capital I to make it visually indistinguishable from the first one which is a legitimate Windows service. Nice. 

Having gotten over that panic, I then started looking to find out what the problem was.  One of the obvious candidates was that my hard drive was completely full, and therefore there was not enough space to run the boot process.

Catch-22: I needed an operating system running with access to the drive to delete some files, but I couldn't boot that operating system until the files had been deleted.

Windows wouldn't start in any configuration I tried, including command mode, safe mode, or last known good configuration.  Back in the old days, I would have made or found a boot disk from another machine, and started under DOS, and quickly deleted a few excess files.  There is just one problem with this, or more accurately two, in that the machine has no floppy disk, and the file system within the machine is NTFS, which DOS cannot read anyway.

I went searching online, and found the website for FreeDOS, where I downloaded a CD-ROM image that I tried to burn on my home machine.  It turns out that Sonic Record Now version 6, which is what came with this machine, seems to be incapable of directly burning a CD-ROM image to a disc.  I found a very good freeware utility called iso-recorder that I installed, which worked perfectly.  This still did not solve my problem with the fact that the file system is NTFS.  After searching around for a while, I found a couple of utilities to make boot discs, but for obvious reasons, Microsoft would frown upon anyone making iso-images of Windows boot disks freely available.  What I did find however, was an iso-image that included a utility to read NTFS and had FreeDOS all in the same package.

I managed to use this to start up the laptop and confirm that both the memory and disk system was completely intact, but the utility had no way of allowing DOS commands to run on NTFS, so from the point of view of deleting files, I was no further forward.

Then I had a bright idea, I remembered that I had an installation disk for Windows XP, that I had used to upgrade an old laptop.  Using that I was able to boot into the recovery console, and the only problem at that point was that I needed to know the administrator password for my particular laptop.  I tried to get this password from SAP support, and guess what, there is no way on earth they are going to tell anybody else what it is.  Kinda fair enough I suppose.

So, I still have a dead laptop, and the whole day has been a complete waste, apart from the fact I have reacquainted myself with quite a few system utilities, and even found some interesting new ones.  I guess tomorrow I will get in the car the drive to the nearest SAP office to see we can resolve it that way.  One thing for certain, all of my data is properly backed up, and so least I don't have that worry.

Salmon Day.