Brian

I have since gotten to the "blue screen of death" At least this is what Acer calls it! Among all the information here was that a critical system driver is missing or corrupt. It then said the following.... FILE\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\SISRAID 4 SYS STATUS 0XC000098 A totally different screen I was able to get to said "EDIT BOOT OPTIONS FOR WINDOWS SETUP" at the top, followed by: PATH\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\BOOT\WINLOAD.EXE This is followed by 5 lines of code within brackets with a blinking cursor at the end looking like it's waiting for something to be entered. Not knowing what, I pushed enter and the screen just went blank. I recorded the 5 lines of code if anyone is interested, but I have ordered the Acer recovery disk and will wait for that and hope I can a least get into Windows to restore factory settings or re-load drivers.

Thanks Dave, but I have tried that a million times and never get to the eRecovery part...it just wants to go to a page that says CMOS setup utility which doesn't mention recovery at all. I have pushed delete during boot up and gotten to a boot menu which also doesn't mention recovery.

I have contacted Acer and am prepared to order a recovery disk, but I am woried that if I have a device driver problem, a disk won't do me any good. Is there a way to determine if I have a hardware problem? The blue screen messsage was "BAD_POOL_HEADER"

I do not have a disk, it came pre-loaded. I heard only one beep when I fired it up. I tried re-setting my ram and nothing happend. I heard that I'm supposed to push alt and f10 as it's loading and that will take me to a page where I can reset to factory settings. I see a page called cmos setup with many options but nothing that says anything about restoring factory settings.

Help! I have looked all over this site, and nothing seems to help my situation. I have an Acer Aspire desktop, model M1640 which will not boot up past the microsoft icon with the bar under it. I have tried launching in safe mode, did nothing. I tried launching using "the last known successfull configuration" Also, nothing. I did get a blue screen once which said Windows has encountered a problem and shutdown to prevent damage to your computer. It also displayed the following message: BAD_POOL_HEADER.....also a long message that says: 0X00000019 (0X00000070,0X8121EA08,0X8121EA18,0X08020005) Sticker says Motherboard type MCP73 . This is all the info I can think of. I was planning maybe next to try using a bootable disk to access recovery mode in Windows. I sure hope someone can help! Thanks....:confused:

Brian Hi guys! Although I love computers and enjoy using them when they're working right, the thought of going under the hood scares the bajeebers out of me!:eek: It will be nice to have so many people to talk to with maybe similar problems and/or experiences. I came accross this site while googling solutions to my computer problems.