no video card after system crash

Hi everybody,

this morning I had a system crash. hal.dll file was missing and I had to restore it from cd. I've managed to do it but after rebooting my inspiron6000 (low

resolution mode) the system did not have any drivers and started to update all of them. All went well and the system restarted in... low resolution again. I've opened

the display properties and was only able to set it up to 1600x1200 - I have WUXGA-1920 and the refresh time was extremely slow. First thing I did was to check the hardware manager - I DONT SEE A VIDEO CARD THERE! Display properties>>settings - I have only default monitor. Adapter tab looks like this:



So I went to dell.com and downloaded this:

ATI MobilityRadeon X300, v.8.162-050803a2-025823C, A04
http://ftp.us.dell.com/video/R106547.EXE

but I was not able to install it:



So I tried catalyst 7.3 http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/xp/radeonx-xp.html. Again:



Another drivers - http://www.omegadrivers.net/ati/win2k_xp.php. The installation was successful but after restarting the system NOTHING CHANGED!

At the very end I tried http://www.ati.com/online/mobilecatalyst/ but got this some installation error as previously.

Please help, I have no idea what to do next

zxc

 

Something more serious than a missing file may have gone on. What were you doing before it had this crash? Was the machine overclocked at all?

The graphics chip may be partially disabled from heat damage or something. It's quite strange that it's returning no info to you, and kinda indicative of a near-total card failure.

 

no overclocking.
I wasn't doing anything unusual. Run the chkdsk yesterday because I have some files that I can not delete (I have them for about 2 months now, so don't think that's the problem) then reboot system, worked for few hours and left it running over the night. When I restarted it in the morning got system boot failure - missing or corrupted hal.dll file. I extracted backup from installation disk and... rest of the story is above

please dont even scare me, 2 months ago I had a battery crash and now this?
how can I test video card?

 

I dunno man. I haven't seen any utilities to test it, but since you're not getting any identifying information in your Drivers section or anything, it's kinda iffy as to what's happening. It certainly seems like a PCI system or video card failure of some sort.

Someone posted a link to this utility to identify devices under Windows. You should see if it will return correct information about your video card.

Check and see if there's an unknown device in your Device Manager as well.

 

no information about video card in this software

1 unknown device

Code:

Unknown Device
	Driver Vender: Microsoft
	PnpID: usb\unknown

No unknown devices in Device Manager. only yellow exclamation mark next to Mobile Intel(R) 915GM/PM Express PCI Express Root Port - 2591.

Code:

Mobile Intel(R) 915GM/PM Express PCI Express Root Port - 2591
	Chip: Intel Corporation
	Detail
		PnpID
			VEN_8086&DEV_2591&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_03
		Vender
			Intel
		Device
			Mobile Intel(R) 915GM/PM Express PCI Express Root Port - 2591
		Chip Vender
			Intel Corporation

one more thing. In device manager, under computer, I see "acpi uniprocessor pc" which I am sure was not there before.

I google it and it seams this has something to do with HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) so maybe this is important?

 

My bet is a big driver issue, nothing life threatening, I don't think an X300 would be ever hot enough to suffer heat damage.Catalyst 7.3 has got some bad bugs with external display [from what I have read], try Catalyst 6.12 or Catalyst 7.2, something you are pretty sure works.
Beforehand use ATI uninstall to get rid of the remnants of the previous thing [though I don't thing it'll work completely, if not restore again]
Good Luck.

 

just tried catalyst 7.2 and 6.12 - same errors as above

also tried dna-ati 3.7 and 4.5 - same as omega, installation Ok but nothing changes

 

Did you try a system restore?

 

not yet. I looked at it and I have one point from yesterday after the crash and from March 22nd. you think this is safe in this situation? I have extremely valuable data on HDD right now

 

Back them up or burn them to a DVD and proceed to a full system restore.

 

well, I guess I'll do it but with my luck the whole system will crash and I want to be prepared. I've heard many times that installing windows on laptop can be problematic because of lack of drivers for mainboard/HDD.
How can I make sure my laptop will read xp installation cd in case of format?

 

You can instruct your notebook to boot from CD - it's during boot up, I think you hit F11/F12 or something and you can change it in your bios.

 

no, I was referring to the situation when system does not see the drive and/or HDD because there are no default drivers for them.

 

just finished system restore. unfortunately after re-installing all the drivers again (except video of course) my situation did not change still dont see video card and my screen sucks!

 

See if you can get your hands on a copy of Everest and see what it tells you about your video card.Then possibly you can find the correct driver. If Everest does not show your video card, it is probably fried.

 

Flash the BIOS to the lastest.

 

everest does see it properly (ATI Mobility Radeon x300), so does bios. And I'm also using it all the time in 1600x1200 resolution with extremely slow refresh rate.