Howdy.

This morning, I woke up to find that my computer wouldn’t fire up.  It's been years since that happened.  There was some kind of message about “lsass.exe” which wouldn’t execute.  After researching on the internet and reading posts, I couldn’t find anything that seemed to work, so I decided to use my three week old (verified) Ghost 2003 image.  Ghost has always worked in the past for me.

My computer has XP Pro, 80 G hard drive with four partitions.  The Ghost image is on E and my OS is on C partition.

I used a 3.5 floppy to boot into DOS and started copying over the C partition.  But Ghost stopped somewhere in the middle and cried “Internal error 25002.  An internal inconsistency has been detected.”  My research on that error says that the drive/partition/image file(?) is too fragmented, but I don’t think so.  Anyway, by now, I don’t have any operating system to boot up with.  My most valuable files are on D, E and F, however.

My thinking is that I have to rebuild my C partition, but I’m not sure.  I can’t imagine what could have changed, since my computer is the same now as it was when I made the image.  I don’t think I have a virus, nor do I think my C partition was too fragmented, but what can I do?  All my software and Norton AV are/were current.  Adaware has recently been run and Spybot too.  One thing I can say is that my image wasn’t compressed.  In the past, I’ve compressed it to a medium level, or at least I think I did.  

So from this come many questions.  I don’t know whether to use Ghost again, that’s for sure.

1)      What could cause this situation?  Can I repair the trouble?  I read things that could have caused the lsass.exe error could be memory sticks (I have 384M) and other things.  Could the uncompressed image be larger than the available space?

2)      If I can’t fix it, do I have to completely erase the C partition?  If so, how?  I don’t have any OS to work with.  I have f-disk and a Windows boot up disk and have used them before, but only for completely rebuilding the hard drive.
 
3)      Could I just pretend that the partition is blank and re-load NT and then XP Pro?

I hope there’s a good answer in this.

Zergkiller

Well, the bottom line is that my computer’s back up and running.  I hadn’t done anything wrong, but there was something I didn’t know.

The way it happened was thus:

As long as I’ve had Ghost, there were discussions of “flags” or “switches” or whatever they’re called. Since I never used them, and all my attempts at understanding what they were encountered the pious and haughty language of writers who think I should already know what they’re talking about, I had my own set of beliefs as to what they were.

My research on the 25007 error had mentioned a command line of ghost.exe –ntc-, but I had always thought these things were for industrial strength masterminds who ran big company computers.  And somewhere I believed that I had to determine my wishes when the original install took place.  This command had the reputation of forcing Ghost to copy the defragmented clusters (whatever that means) in spite of their being defragmented.  The word “defragmented” caught my attention.

The boot up disk I use has always immediately shown me graphics with no opportunity to vary the order of things, but this time, I made some incursions into “options” and some other menus I had never investigated.  No luck.  Then: “Something wonderful happened”.

My optical mouse is hooked into my computer by a series of jacks and adapters.  I don’t know why, I just follow instructions.  Sometimes, it isn’t really making good contact and doesn’t get involved in boot up, so, no mouse.  And this is what happened.  I ended up in the Ghost process with no mouse, and just because I didn’t know what else to do, I hit “return” key.  Lo and behold, the DOS screen opened up, and I had, for the first time ever, the opportunity to enter something on a command line.  I entered the ghost.exe –ntc- command.  With my C partition scrapped, I figured I couldn’t lose anything.

The A drive floppy started clicking away.  I remembered the “click of death” syndrome, and I almost ejected the floppy.  But after many seconds, the screens with which I was accustomed appeared.  And all proceeded normally after that.  Except that my computer took about four and a half hours to do something that should have taken only about an hour.

So there’s the story.  Maybe someone will read this and save time and anguish.  If I read things correctly, Ghost 2003 shouldn’t have this problem, and, by the way, after all of the updates had been installed, I used the Microsoft disk defragmenter in Computer Management to check the level of defragmentation on C, and was informed that the volume did not need defragmentation.  Go figure.

I can’t believe someone answered my post in less than 24 hours.  Thank you Nightowl.

Oh, a long time ago, I used Ghost to save my bacon, and then did a defragmentation check on the resultant C partition.  Ghost had completely defragmented the file.  Perhaps that’s what happens when you use some form of compression to create the partition’s Ghost file.  

I find “Computer Science” to be heavily laced with superstition.

Thanks again,

Zergkiller