Slightly Less Pathetic

(Mood Improvements)

Well, I still don't have a working console, but Mom's lappy is back among the living!

Basically, this is what I did over the last two days:

* Searched for others with "lsass.exe - System Error Security Accounts Manager initialization failed because of the following error: The handle is invalid, Error Status: 0xc0000008"

Relevant results I could find almost always suggested Sasser infection. Sasser was what? 2004? In any case, I yanked the laptop's drive, shoved it into my 2.5" enclosure and scanned the whole thing. Clean. Next step...

* Kept searching, and results from other desperate types suggested corruption with either the SAM or Security registry hives. One post said to swap in the %windows%\repair copy of SAM. Another said to try Security.

Attempts at this failed and so I wondered if Windows was fighting me, either in hidden files or System Restore controls. I dug up a minimal Linux live-CD with NTFS support, called PartedMagic, burned it using the Win2003 ResKit tool called cdburn, and tried the SAM/Security copy thing from Linux.

Aerin's Linux desktop skill rises 0.1 points!
Aerin's Linux CLI skill rises 0.3 points!

But it didn't work either. However, the error message changed. "lsass.exe: When trying to update a password the return status indicates that the value provided as the current password is not correct"

* Searches for this new error led me to a Microsoft KB article that seemed helpful: How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting.

THIS time, after grinding all the steps in that KB, the system booted and restored to a point only 7 days before the screwup.

So now, at least I have one way in to FFXI!