sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Computers & Programming Computers, Software, Accessories Detecting Array

When my home computer boots up, and sometimes when it is already up and running, the entire screen goes black, and then this message pops up. I think it is a message caused by the disply adapter that is in the computer. It is an NVIDIA, and I have no clue as to what this might mean. I did get it to come back up & running yesterday, and the first thing I did was to do a backup. Can someone tell me what this means? Running XP Home, SP2.

Is it an onboard video or a separate card? You might need new drivers...

Jeff the entire computer is a new one, bought just a few months ago. I have tried to go back to a known good configuration, but it was a no-go. I also tried a chkdsk, and a scan disk, which, after 24 hours of running, is still going strong. It is displaying a whole monitor full of "sector ##### is unreadable", and I'm starting to get worried. I haven't called eMachines tech support, but I suppose I will have to.

Oh, in answer to your question, it is an onboard display adapter.

Typically, very few components would have the ability to black out the screen and display a message... and the display adapter is one of them. Another might be the BIOS. Then again, Windows has some odd screens that can come up in bad situations.

The text on the screen, what style of text does it look like? Old DOS text or more stylized? Dull gray, or bright white? Does it just say "Detecting Array"? any "..."?

Any chance you could take a pic with a cell phone or other digital camera?

Well, the 'puter is busy with the chkdsk program right now, but I will let it finish, and then take a pic with my digital camera & post it on photobucket. The font is, though, a dull white, with a black screen. The computer is locked up, meaning I can't do anything else with it. It does say NVIDIA Bios 6.33, then on the next line is "detecting array".

From researching that it appears to be a conflict with the system Bios and or the NVidia drivers. You can double check your bios and make sure that raid is disabled in the Bios Settings. If that is not an option in BIOS then try to download a few different versions of video drivers and try one till the error goes away.
I did a google search and it seems the error can be a lot of different issues -

With all the unreadable sectors reported in the chkdsk it sounds like you may have a hard drive fault, which could be forcing the machine to reboot when it tries to access those sectors for some reason. "Detecting Array" to my knowledge is usually a bios message where the raid is turned on and the SATA or IDE channels are checking to see if you have drives set up in it. One thing to try would be to run chkdsk again but use the /R switch with it, this tells it to fix all the bad sectors it can and recover any readable data. Another way to rule out your video card driver possibilities is to run it in safe mode with networking for a while. If it happens there it isn't a driver problem as high end drivers are not loaded in safe mode. One other thing: You DO have a good antivirus and good spyware removal tools on there that are up to date right?

With that many bad sectors, it sounds like the disk is failing quickly. Make a backup.

A bad disk can cause all sorts of problems as it can slowly corrupt data in drivers or the windows kernel before it's reported as a bad sector.

Well, I don't really know what is happening. I tried to interrupt the chkdsk program, and failed, so I just pulled the plug on the cpu. I rebooted, not selecting any type of "repair" problem, and it came right up. I did some snooping, and found out that the power profile had the hard drives stop spinning at about 10 minutes of inactivity, so I changed that to never. It has stayed up and running all night, and is still up. So, I don't know what the long term effects of keeping the hard drives spinning all the tima would be, but I am going to be backing up on a weekly basis from now on. Thanks for all your help! I hope that I can count on you again in the near future - I have a feeling about this!! I also did not notice any degradation of the computer - I went through and opened all my usual programs, and found them to be working perfectly.

Sounds like a sata controller issue, I would look for a bios upgrade. I have also seen similar issues come from faulty RAM or a faulty hard drive. Seagate makes an awesome utility that is free called seatools that will test any manufacturers drive and test your ram. They were having too many returned drives that were really bad ram so they decided to include a ram tester. it works ok, but for really getting a good ram test I use a utility called quick tech pro or QTPro
go to www.seagate.com to download seatools and they make a version that you burn to cd as an iso and its bootable.