Hello. Well, where do i start. A couple of days ago my PC was full of c***, so i decided to reboot the PC. I put the CD in, and it got to 10% when an error came up, it said 'Critical Error......Read Fault'. So then i took out the CD and then restarted the comp. It loaded up normally but it came to the screen where it said 'Verifying DMI Pool Data' and it just stays there now, it wont load up. So i rang PC Service Call, and the pseron said that the DMI Chip in the motherboard it broken or something.(i know that is probably bull****) (If you think it is something else that is the problem then please say). My PC Specs are as follows: Advent (Advent 8737) Pentium 3 128mb Ram 20GB 600Mhz BTW, i found out that i can solve this problem by going into the BIOS set-up, by pressing DEL when you on the PC, so i tried this by theres a password set to it and can't get in.

here is a link to overall bios passwords overall passwords

the verifying dmi pool data is a real nasty one, that I hardly ever managed to solve... if you can boot with a windows 98 startup floppy disk, try to run scandisk the command is: scandisk c: /autofix /nosave /nosummary /surface this will take quit a long time, let it do its work, even if it takes several hours be sure to keep the hard disk that is in your computer when the problem first occurred, for it is most certain that very hard disk that causes the trouble

I don't want to frighten you, but somehow this problem looks like what makes Windows XP so user unfriendly. I mean this: when you take a hard disk out of one Windows 98 computer and put it in another computer, the computer starts Windows 98, detects that the motherpoard with all its components and add on cards have changed. the difference between XP and Windows 98 is, that Windows 98 will smoothly detect all of the new hardware and will install it. A perfect system. Not so XP: XP won't even start, it just stops with a blue screen. This built in 'attitude' of XP looks like the built in 'attitude' of most motherboards when the "Verifying DMI Pool Data" message appears. The system seems to keep searching for specific data, that only seems to exist on the hard disk that it used to detect at startup. Though I must says, that ony one time I managed to get the computer running, but that was when I put in an old hard disk. The DMI message appeared. So I put back the original hard disk, and then the message did not appear anymore. There are lots of sites that have suggestions to overcome the problem, but they never helped me solve it. The only thing I can think of (and that I have not yet tried) is to put the hard disk in another computer (as a slave) and let Partition Magic check the drive and fix errors. Partition Magic is a very powerful program.

I've already tried doing the full surface scan, but no errors come up, i haven't tried the passwords for CMOS setup, and if one of them were to work, what do i do next?

"I put the CD in, and it got to 10% when an error came up, it said 'Critical Error......Read Fault'. So then i took out the CD and then restarted the comp." Is that the Win98 CD and during the reinstall is when it stopped at 10%? If so then try cleaning the CD going from the center to the edges. You can use a mild dishwashing liquid to clean it. Make sure it is thoroughly dry before trying to use it again. Bryan

^I've cleaned the CD thoroughly enough