You never know what I’m going to talk about next. Even I wonder if there is a method to my madness (I hope so 🙂 ). Anyway, today’s task is to update the SAP kernel on my ERP 6.0 EHP4 system. I can’t get the crazy thing to start, so one of the suggestions online was to upgrade to the latest kernel, so here I am.
Step one. Download the files. YOu need the database file, the database independent file, and of course SAPCAR.EXE. You can find all this on service.sap.com. Normally, I just do a search and look for Kernel and my version. In this case, I needed to find Kernel 7.01. From here, SAP will guide you down the path depending on your OS and your DB type. Look for the file with the biggest number or latest date.
Next up, save all these files to a location, and extract them. This is what SAPCAR is for. Since I’m on windows, I use the cmd.exe and navigate to where I saved the files. I then use the command sapcar -xvf *.SAR. The only catch is that once you start the extract, make sure and move SAPCAR.EXE to a different directory. It gets extracted out the files you are extracting and will dump when it encounters the same file. You can also extract to a different directory, which probably the better approach.
Next, save a copy of your current kernel, just in case. For me, the path is: c:\usr\sap\<SID>\SYS\exe\us\NTAMD64\. I’ll just grab all of these files and save them somewhere else. If things go horribly wrong, I’ll just wipe out the changes and paste these files back in.
So obviously, I copy the extracted files to the kernel location. Be sure to leave all of the existing files in the directory. Depending on the Kernel, not everything gets updated.
Now test. I usually restart my system, just to be safe and then fire up SAP. in general, it’s that’s easy… Hopefully this gets my EHP4 system working so I can take advantage of the new testing and debugging tools not available in kernel 7.00. Unfortunately, for me, my Kernel doesn’t seem to be the issue. So back to the drawing board. It might mean a new install 🙁
Thanks,
Mike