Standby and Auto-Power off disabled

[Naren Parker]

Hi Guys

I have a problem with the Standby option and Auto-Power off feature of my system. Mine is an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ on an MSI RS480M2-IL motherboard with 1.5 GB RAM of which 128 MB is shared by the onboard ATi Radeon Xpress200 graphics chipset. I have two hard drives - a 120GB SATA on which Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 3 is loaded and a 40GB IDE drive.

The problem started when I had left DiskCleanup unattended to clean up the Compress Old Files option. During the process, there was a power outage. When I switched on the PC later, I got an error message that hal.dll was not found. Then I went to the Recovery Console and expanded the hal.dl_ file in the i386 folder on the Service Pack 2 CD. (I didnt have a slipstreamed version of SP3 then). The OS booted and started loading all the drivers. Everything seemed to work fine.

But the Standby option which was once functional has been grayed out. I dont find Advanced Power Management options in the Power Management applet in Control Panel. Also, the performance of the IDE hard drive has taken a hit. Videos stutter when I play from that hard-drive but there is no such problem with the SATA drive.

My device manager lists ACPI Uniprocessor PC and also Standard PC in the Computer section. I dont want to re-format the OS as I have many documents and tweaked programs.

So, any idea how to enable those features? Will disabling and re-enabling ACPI in the BIOS work? How do I get the HAL to recognize that I have an ACPI compliant PC? And what about the decrease in performance of the 40GB IDE drive?

Thanks all in advance.

[iinfi]

reinstall ur display drivers n chk again!!

[Naren Parker]

tried that the first thing. but of no avail. i also downloaded the latest drivers using my motherboard's online update utility but the problem still persists. even daemon tools doesnt work.

[Amir.php]

There are two main causes of this type of problem:
1. graphics card driver not installed.
2. if driver is already installed, then installed driver is unsigned.
check out these link for help:
http://www.rickrogers.org/standby.htm

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308514

[Naren Parker]

Thnks for the replies guys. But as far as I know ATi drivers are certified and I have the latest Catalyst version. The problem is lying in the ACPI configuration. My PC shows up as Standard PC when I press F5 during Windows Setup when it asks to press F6 asking for a third party RAID driver. The OS is not recognizing it as ACPI compliant even though ACPI is enabled in the BIOS. This is the reason why Standby and Auto power-off are not functioning. All the drivers are certified. But still I'm unable to rectify the problem no matter what. I tried expanding the hal.dl_ file from the slipstreamed SP3 CD. But of no use...