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Last night I went to my dad's house to help him get rid of a piece of software that kept pop'n up on his screen. It turn out to be a media player that my newphew was using. While solving that simple problem I noticed that my dad who is 81 had a few updates waiting in the tray to d/l and install. One was Java which installed no problem and the other was windows updates of SP3. This being a fairly new Acer, I figured I would let it d/l and install. This being a fairly long proccess I figure I would come back in the morning and make sure all was fine. Well I got the phone call early this Saturday morning before I got up that there was a problem. I head over and found the black screen with "Verifying the DMI Pool or maybe VMI pool Data....... " the cursor one line below just blinking away. That's all it will do.

I asked Dad if he turned it off and he said he did about 4 hours after I left last night but I have no idea if he just switched it off or actually went to shut down and turn it off. He can't find the XP disc that came with the puter and it is only about 6 months old. I figured that would be the only way to boot it up. I have an XP disc but figured it would prolly need to be the Acer disc in order to work right? I can get into BIOS but that's all and there is no way to recover from there. Could SP3 have hosed his puter? Is there any way to recover without a full reformat?

Thnx in advance for any help!

Hey Homey,

I don't know the fix but found these articles which may help.

www.computerhope.com/i...000474.htm

www.duxcw.com/faq/computer/dmi.html

I just googled the message you got so, if these are no good, you can get more by doing the same.
Hope this helps.
Good luck.
(remember when we used to have pen and paper ?)

Thnx Shades I'll shall look into them

It's unlikely the SP3 update did anything to cause that and it's been my experience with that issue that it can be resolved by the same suggestions as those two links suggest Homey. I've seen the times the black screen will eventually start XP and at other times, corrupted hardware such as CD/DVD Roms, Floppy Drives, USB drives, etc would cause it. If that's not successful, I think you know the final outcome and you do have a restore disk...