Hey all,

I am a rookie looking for some help...my computer won't boot but just keeps stopping at "Detecting Array..."

Any advice?

Thanks in advance, any help would be greatly appreciated

Did you have your hard drives configured in a RAID array, which type? The error suggests that one of the drives may have died. Depending on the RAID configuration you may be able to just replace the drive and be back in business.

Hey...thanks for the quick reply. To give you some history, I had a buddy build me this computer a couple years ago and he striped the drives ( I guess to make things faster). So there are 2 hard drives, plus my external hd. Does striped mean that if I lose one hard drive I lose both?

Last night I tried to boot my computer up and it worked, then as I was navigating Symantec and simultaneously fiddling with my External Drive (Maxtor 500GB) the computer froze...so I turned the power off and tried to reboot, and now I'm back to square one because it stops again at "Detecting Array"....
I can't figure out why it booted up just fine last night. The only thing I did was let it sit for a day or so. Everything appeared to be normal when it booted back up.

Any thoughts? Thanks

It sounds like you have a drive failing. Re-seat, or change the cables. Maybe just a bad connection or cable. Also you can run a program like Spinrite. It's a low level hard drive repair tool. If it can be repaired this will repair it. GRC*|*Hard drive data recovery software**
(I usually only recommend free software, but I've had much success with this)

Thanks for the info. I recently installed a new video card that was so big I had to adjust some cables, so it could be a cable issue. But I'm worried my drives are failing.
The day before we started having problems, the power went out. I have a UPS, and it prompted me to shut down. However, I didn't get to my computer for about 5 mins and when I got there...an application error message appeared that I had to ok before it would shut down. I worry that this delay caused some problems...any chance of that?

Thanks

As S-n-M suggested...you are probably having harddrive failures. Spinrite is a great program....use it to recover the lost drive's stored info/data and you should be back up with the new drive.....

The power failure or HARD SHUTDOWN could have caused this so I would be cautious as to the use of the other drives in the array....you should not be using the external drive as part of the array but as external storage only.