Hello my fellow techies!!
I have spent the last few days working on my friends Sony Vaio PCG-7184L(which by the way is not listed anywhere on sony's website). It runs windows 7 64bit and it freezes immediately after the Windows logo starts it's animation and there's about an inch of the top of the screen that is filled with weird colored lines. So I told him sure, I'll fix it, it's probably just a virus and should be fairly simple. I will list in sequence what I have done so far to diagnose/fix the issue. One more thing, it started doing this freeze up thing the same day he got it back from the Geek Squad at Best Buy, who were doing a simple update and cleaning from what my friend told me. OK, here's what I did...
1. Tried booting into safemode, froze, on hal.dll, with same colored lines at top of screen
2. Tried booting into ERD Commander 2k8 and froze at the same spot.
3. Booted into Linux live CD and scanned for viruses with avast, there were none.
-This is when I looked at his hard drive capacity and realized that only windows was installed, Best Buy must have wiped everything and not told him.
-OK, no viruses, so I'll run hardware checks
5. Found a place to d/l the windows 7 64bit repair disk and ran it only to have it tell me that it can't automatically fix the problem, followed by a report as to which tests were successful and which were not.
4. Booted into Hiren's Boot CD and ran every hardware tester available and all came back clean.
-I remembered seeing three partitions on the Hard Drive while I was in Linux which lead me to my next step.
5. Using Hiren's I booted into the "Repair" partition, which was installed by Sony before my friend purchased the laptop.
-Excellent, I have access to the manufacturers testing tools and restore software.
6. Ran even more tests on both the hard drive and the CPU, just to be absolutely sure.
-At this point I decided, since Best Buy already deleted all my friends music files, I will just set the computer back to factory defaults with the restore computer option.
7. Ran the restore computer option and it successfully completed at 100%, then rebooting the computer and as soon as that windows 7 logo animation started BOOM!!! frozen again!!!
And this is where I am stuck, normally I would think that it must be the graphics controller because it's the only thing I didn't have testing tool for. But, thinking more I remembered that I was able to run the Linux Live CD for over an hour with no problems with video or anything. I can't believe that setting it back to factory defaults didn't fix it. Could it be some kind of crazy rootkit or damn, I don't even know what to do next. I suggested to my friend that if I can't get windows 7 working again that I would try to do a full install of Ubuntu on there for him since he only surfs the net and listens to music it should be fine for him. Please if anyone has any suggestions of what to try next I am all ears, and thank you all in advance for wanting to help.
P.S. Sorry for the super long post, I just figured the details would be useful
OK, back again. I decided to download a fresh hal.dll and replace the one which seems to be failing and now I get this error even before getting to the windows logo. It says:
File: \Windows\system32\hal.dll
Status: 0xc0000359
Info: Windows failed to load because the HAL is missing, or corrupt
I have spent the last few days working on my friends Sony Vaio PCG-7184L(which by the way is not listed anywhere on sony's website). It runs windows 7 64bit and it freezes immediately after the Windows logo starts it's animation and there's about an inch of the top of the screen that is filled with weird colored lines. So I told him sure, I'll fix it, it's probably just a virus and should be fairly simple. I will list in sequence what I have done so far to diagnose/fix the issue. One more thing, it started doing this freeze up thing the same day he got it back from the Geek Squad at Best Buy, who were doing a simple update and cleaning from what my friend told me. OK, here's what I did...
1. Tried booting into safemode, froze, on hal.dll, with same colored lines at top of screen
2. Tried booting into ERD Commander 2k8 and froze at the same spot.
3. Booted into Linux live CD and scanned for viruses with avast, there were none.
-This is when I looked at his hard drive capacity and realized that only windows was installed, Best Buy must have wiped everything and not told him.
-OK, no viruses, so I'll run hardware checks
5. Found a place to d/l the windows 7 64bit repair disk and ran it only to have it tell me that it can't automatically fix the problem, followed by a report as to which tests were successful and which were not.
4. Booted into Hiren's Boot CD and ran every hardware tester available and all came back clean.
-I remembered seeing three partitions on the Hard Drive while I was in Linux which lead me to my next step.
5. Using Hiren's I booted into the "Repair" partition, which was installed by Sony before my friend purchased the laptop.
-Excellent, I have access to the manufacturers testing tools and restore software.
6. Ran even more tests on both the hard drive and the CPU, just to be absolutely sure.
-At this point I decided, since Best Buy already deleted all my friends music files, I will just set the computer back to factory defaults with the restore computer option.
7. Ran the restore computer option and it successfully completed at 100%, then rebooting the computer and as soon as that windows 7 logo animation started BOOM!!! frozen again!!!
And this is where I am stuck, normally I would think that it must be the graphics controller because it's the only thing I didn't have testing tool for. But, thinking more I remembered that I was able to run the Linux Live CD for over an hour with no problems with video or anything. I can't believe that setting it back to factory defaults didn't fix it. Could it be some kind of crazy rootkit or damn, I don't even know what to do next. I suggested to my friend that if I can't get windows 7 working again that I would try to do a full install of Ubuntu on there for him since he only surfs the net and listens to music it should be fine for him. Please if anyone has any suggestions of what to try next I am all ears, and thank you all in advance for wanting to help.
P.S. Sorry for the super long post, I just figured the details would be useful
OK, back again. I decided to download a fresh hal.dll and replace the one which seems to be failing and now I get this error even before getting to the windows logo. It says:
File: \Windows\system32\hal.dll
Status: 0xc0000359
Info: Windows failed to load because the HAL is missing, or corrupt
