tryin 2 recover fm lsass.exe failed to initialize

Hello folks. First post, and it's a doozy.

Am trying to recover my laptop (HP pavillion, about 3 yrs old), which is having a major boot problem thanks to lsass.exe. Based on what i've done and all the internet research (and tech support hell) i've gone thru so far, at this point I'm down to 2 basic questions:

THE CORE QUESTIONS

1. Is there any way to recover at this point without a full reinstall of windows? (I'm not finding a lot of help online, but some things I've read seem to suggest this.)

2. If the answer to the above is no, how can I save four lousy files that are trapped on said computer. Everything else I would lose is either backed up or lose-able, but these are 4 pictures that somehow escaped being backed up.

THE PROBLEM

I'll save the long version for below** if you want the whole history (this is going to be long enough already). The problem I'm having is this evil "lsass.exe failed to initialize" issue. What happens is when I boot the computer, it gives every indication of booting up normally for a few seconds. I get the Windows XP screen with the progress bar chugging away. After a bit, the screen goes black, and I get a windows error message window with the title "lsass.exe application error" and containing the text "The application failed to initialize properly (0x0000005). Click OK to terminate the application."

When I click OK, the error window goes away, and nothing else happens. The screen stays black, the mouse moves, but otherwise, nothing - no hard drive whirring, no lights, no inidication of any activity at all on the part of the computer. My only option is a hard power-down. I have tried Safe Mode and I get the same results, except the black screen I'm left with has got "Safe Mode" written in every corner. rolleyes

I have checked the hard disk using the BIOS screen (at the suggestion of HP tech support) and it all checks out. I've also got Norton Ghost, and I've both checked the hard drive with their utility (all good) and run a full virus check with yesterday's virus definition update (no virus).

So, Question 1:

I'm trying to avoid the psychological pain of doing a full XP reinstall, so I'm looking into other options. Can someone help me evaluate whether these would work?

a) Norton Ghost has a "recovery environment" that runs from the disk, that I can use to try to recover my computer to a previous saved recovery point. (This utility is also how i scanned for viruses and checked the hard drive). This would result in me losing all my data from after that recovery point. I'm confident that any docs i would lose after that point are not mission critical, and except for those 4 photos mentioned above, I have copies of all my other photos since then on separate external HDDs. Do you think this would work?

b) What about trying to repair XP as described
here: http://webcast.broadcastnewsroom.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=8658-0

or here: http://www.informationweek.com/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189400897&pgno=1&queryText=

?

c) any other suggestions?


Question 2:

OK, so supposing I have no other choice but the full OS reinstall. ( :cry ) Can anything be done to rescue these files?

a) I can figure out pretty much exactly where they are (filepath-wise) since I can use the Norton Ghost disk to browse my computer. Is there any way I could use the recovery console to grab those files and copy them to my external HDD?

b) Any other way I can get at those files myself? I have another clunky but functional computer (freezes frequently--but that's a question for another day) that i'm using at the moment to access the internet and try to get some help -- is there anyway i can use this computer to explore/grab files from the uncooperative computer?

I would really appreciate any help I could get. I'm sorry this is such a long post (and about to get longer :duck) but I thought giving more detail would help me get answers.

Thanks a million for any help yall can give.
:cool


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

**THE FULL BACKSTORY...

...as promised above, for those who want all the gory details. Here's the full story of how I got to tis point. About a week ago I left my laptop on all night and was actually awoken in the morning by my computer making an odd sound. it was like a split second of modem static, and then a weird beep sound, and it would keep repeating. So I got up and went to shut down the computer. I was closing down various windows i had open, but after a while the computer froze and I got the dreaded Blue Screen Of Death, with a message that said something about a KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR. (For anyone desiring even more detail, the STOP error codes given were 0x00000007A, 0xc0300670, 0xc000000E, 0xF759C642, and 0x16047860. There was also a line that siad "ftdisk.sys - Address F759c642 base at F7592000, Datestamp 3b7d8419.")

I restarted the computer, but when it came back on, it wouldn't even get me to the windows boot up screen. Instead, I would get an error message saying that the file "system32\drivers\ntfs.sys" was missing or corrupted. I found instructions on the microsoft.com site on how to fix it if this file is corrupted, and I followed it thru. Then I shut down and rebooted, and at first, all seemed to be well and good. Then windows went into CHKDSK mode.

As it was going through the process, lines kept showing up where it said something starting with "deleting index entry" followed by a file name, and then another series where I get the phrase "recovering orphaned files" follwed by a file name. There were dozens if not hundreds of these entries.

Eventually it finished that process, and I held my breath to see if it would go ahead with the boot up. At first, everything looked ok, but then I got the lsass.exe error.

Which pretty much brings us to where I started this post. Again, any help would be deeply appreciated.

:cool

 

In answer to question 1, I wouldn't use the recovery procedure with Ghost, and I prefer the second option that you have listed under b. This basically installs Windows over itself and doesn't delete any of your documents. Just make sure that you have an XP CD of the same type installed on your computer with the same service packs, and not a Recovery CD.

As you mentioned having another computer, you can pull the laptop hard drive and slave it in the other computer ( will require an adapter, if it is a desktop ) and you should be able to see the contents of the drive, providing the computer is running an NTFS file system.

Hope this helps!

 

You can also email yourself the four pictures and have it on the internet for temporary storage (or permanent if you like), then download it after you format.

 

Just posting this reply here for posterity, in case other people (with similarly-limited computer skills as me ) see this in a search on a related question.

In the end, I learned that it was possible to buy a hard drive enclosure for about 20 bucks that allows you to hook up the laptop hard drive via USB to another computer, just as if it were an external hard drive.

Following the instructions of an online video-tutorial of how to remove your laptop hard drive, I took out the hard drive, put it into the enclosure, and connected it to another computer. Easy peasy. I grabbed all the files I was worried about (the four photos I mentioned before, plus a lot more, just because I could), saved it all to a new external hard drive, then went ahead with a total reinstallation of windows.

Voila. Problem solved.