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Motherboard bad??-or Monitor?? HAL.DLL

2K views 5 replies 5 participants last post by  Falconoffury 
#1 ·
Hi all,
Here is my dilemma: I have a Gateway system (bought 12/05) with an Intel Motherboard. (System is owned by b-inlaw). I am trying to help him techwise. I have an AAS in Comp Science but have not worked with the hardware for a while. Anyways, his system went down: got an error about something with his USB port not responding. He has an external backup drive via USB and his monitor is connected via USB. He would reboot the system but was getting an error on screen upon reboot (HAL.DLL file missing or corrupt). Unfortunately, he has a business that requires use of the pc to run it (wire machine). Therefore, he had to call Bestbuy's Geek Squad to come out and try to figure what was wrong. I couldn't take the day off work to troubleshoot. To make a long story short, here is my question:
The tech said his motherboard was bad (I wasn't there but my b-inlaw said he had something on the screen that said motherboard was bad). I don't know of any diagnostic software that can tell you if a motherboard is bad (any ideas)??? Anyways, there are software settings for his wire machine that we needed from his hard drive so the tech removed it and transferred all his data over to a new system that my b-inlaw HAD to buy because he was told his motherboard was bad. The only way to access his windows on his hard drive is in safe mode (I put drive into my pc). Well, I started to research specifications on motherboards and troubleshooting them. I decided to try and hook up my monitor via the serial cable because of that error he was getting with the usb. I restored the windows op sys from the orig restore disc while it was in my pc. I put the hard drive back in the supposed bad motherboard system and it booted up just fine.
Here are my final questions: 1) What diagnostic tool would the tech guy have used to say the motherboard was bad? 2) If his monitor or the external hard drive is bad (because of the usb port) would that have corrupted the HAL.DLL file? I have not tried the monitor because I don't want to kill my system if it has a short in it. How can I troubleshoot this? Sorry for the long story. I hope someone can help answer my questions. The pc has win xp pro on it. Thanks for any help,

navycpo:4-dontkno
 
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#2 · (Edited)
howdy navycpo and welcome to TSF,

Geek squad was wrong..

When it said HAL was missing (hardware abstraction layer) just meant he must have put in somthing new maybe a hard drive? Or it was just corrupt..The geek squad should have known this just from the Hal error. All they needed to do is do a repair install of XP. the rest is history. Wonder how much they charged for that one? He got ripped..

Here is a linnk explaining HAl, you should send it to geek sqaud as well lol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_abstraction_layer

As for couold a hard drive corrupt HAL, its not impossible..But I am pretty sure all is well now after you did the repair install
 
#3 ·
Thanks Geek73. Yeah, he did get ripped by the geeksquad. They charge 150 to come out on top of their hourly charge. Anyways, the reinstall of the os did work since I was able to bring up the hard drive in the old system just fine. My next plan of attack is to hook his monitor that the squad said was bad also via the serial instead of usb since I think the usb port is what is bad. Is it easy to change out a usb port module on a motherboard? Where should I go to get one?
 
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