# Unhelpful websites. **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [November 14, 2011, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unhelpful-websites/602940 "2011-11-14T21:32:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Lobsang](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobsang/32/4067_2.png) [@Lobsang](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobsang)\ **Post date:** [November 14, 2011, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unhelpful-websites/602940/1 "2011-11-14T21:32:00Z")
This is partly to rant and partly to ask a genuine question… Anyone know what the ‘sos’ in the “/sos” boot.ini switch actually _stands for_? I have found eleventy billion articles on the internet that tell me what it _does_ but not a single one tells me what ‘s’ ‘o’ ‘s’ actually stands for. The reason this is so annoying is that I’m MUCH more likely to remember what the switch does if I know what its letters stand for. What it does is list the drivers being loaded during boot. if it wasn’t ‘sos’ and was ‘ldl’ which stood for ‘List Drivers being Loaded’ I’d remember it forever. but because it’s ‘sos’ I am likely to forget it two seconds after I’ve learnt it. It’s probably something really obvious that relates to listing drivers being loaded but I can’t work it out. ---
**Author:** ![Giraffe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giraffe/32/129_2.png) [@Giraffe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giraffe)\ **Post date:** [November 14, 2011, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unhelpful-websites/602940/2 "2011-11-14T21:47:03Z")
> [@Lobsang](#): > > It’s probably something really obvious that relates to listing drivers being loaded but I can’t work it out. Any reason to think it’s not just SOS as in the naval distress call? Sort of a catch-all “help!” switch which displays information needed to fix a borked system? ---
**Author:** ![Jas09](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d07c76/32.png) [@Jas09](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jas09)\ **Post date:** [November 14, 2011, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unhelpful-websites/602940/3 "2011-11-14T22:15:45Z")
I always assumed the same as **Giraffe**. SOS means what it means elsewhere - HELP PLEASE! ---
**Author:** ![galen\_ubal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/galen_ubal/32/4440_2.png) [@galen\_ubal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/galen_ubal)\ **Post date:** [November 14, 2011, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unhelpful-websites/602940/4 "2011-11-14T22:55:15Z")
/SOS - Displays the driver names while they are being loaded. Use this switch if Windows NT won’t start up and you think a driver is missing. This option is configured by default on the [VGA] option on the boot menu. [From here.](http://www.pctools.com/guides/registry/detail/1268/) Apparently part of Safe Mode bootup. ,but you already know that. I should read better, shouldn’t I? ---
**Author:** ![galen\_ubal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/galen_ubal/32/4440_2.png) [@galen\_ubal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/galen_ubal)\ **Post date:** [November 14, 2011, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unhelpful-websites/602940/5 "2011-11-14T23:12:08Z")
Okay, let’s see if I can recover some face here… Well, what it does is displays the driver names - or SHOWS them. So the first letter may refer to show. Show On Startup, perhaps? Mind you, I agree it’s annoying no one’s ever bothered to write them out… ---
**Author:** ![Crazyhorse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crazyhorse/32/31_2.png) [@Crazyhorse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crazyhorse)\ **Post date:** [November 14, 2011, 11:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unhelpful-websites/602940/6 "2011-11-14T23:21:40Z")
It stands for “[Son of Strike](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonz/archive/2003/10/21/53581.aspx)” > [@](#): > > First let me get the trivia out of the way. The original name of the CLR team (chosen by team founder and former Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Mike Toutonghi) was “Lighting”. Larry Sullivan’s dev team created an ntsd extension dll to help facilitate the bootstrapping of v1.0. We called it strike.dll (get it? “Lightning Strike”? yeah, I know, ba’dump bum). PSS really needed this in order to give us information back to the team when it was time to debug nasty stress failures, which are almost always done with the Windows debugger stack. But we didn’t want to hand out our full strike.dll, because it contained some “dangerous” commands that if you really didn’t have our source code could cause you confusion and pain (even to other Microsoft teams). So I pushed the team to create “Son of Strike” (Simon from our dev takes credit/blame for this), and we shipped it with the product starting with Everett (aka V1.1). ---
**Author:** ![Lobsang](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobsang/32/4067_2.png) [@Lobsang](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobsang)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2011, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unhelpful-websites/602940/7 "2011-11-15T21:07:26Z")
> [@Crazyhorse](#): > > It stands for “[Son of Strike](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonz/archive/2003/10/21/53581.aspx)” I think I might have been better off not knowing 😃 But thanks Crazyhorse, and others. ---
**Author:** ![Jas09](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d07c76/32.png) [@Jas09](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jas09)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2011, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unhelpful-websites/602940/8 "2011-11-15T21:17:18Z")
I don’t think Son of Strike is what you’re talking about **Lobsang** … the SOS described in that blog post is part of the .NET development environment, not the NT bootloader.