And Suddenly . . . . Silence

[Nflight]

I lost one of my systems ladies and Gentlemen. It was 9 years old, something had to give! It won't reboot it says it "can not detect array" on boot up. Is this terminal? In all my years of training in the IT field I have now become more of a "grand user" then a real IT tech support kind of person.

Any advice is welcome !!! Psst this was my only running GPU rig!

[AMDave]

That would be out of warranty then. :P

The message "can not detect array" suggests that either the BIOS or a hardware RAID card is looking for a HDD RAID array.
If you were not running a RAID array then I suspect the BIOS has fouled up.
Continuing with that line of thought, check &/ replace the BIOS battery on the Mobo and rebuild your BIOS settings (usually press ESC or some other key displayed on startup)
If there is no battery, then there is likely a capacitor that has failed and could no longer provide power to the BIOS chips.
You want to examine the small black or blue cylinders on your board and look for any where the silver end may have expanded upwards and outwards leaking a brownish ooze.
It is possible to replace some of those at cost but if the ooze made it onto the mobo then you will likely have a mobo issue as well.
Make sure the power is turned off on the PSU until you have done this check. The last thing you want is an electrical fire!

If the BIOS is not the issue and you were in fact running a HDD RAID array then it is somewhat more difficult to diagnose and repair. I have trouble enough doing that myself.
If you have backups then you can look at doing a RAID rebuild after doing some research for the manuals and instructions.
If you had important files and data on those drives that was not backed up and you must have back, then I recommend taking the box to a pro and shelling a few bucks to get the data put onto a new drive to put into a new(er) PC.

If you were not running a raid array and you suspect the BIOS or Mobo to be the problem, you can check that your HDD is ok by plugging it into another machine to check that the drive is still readable.
The point of the excercise here is, if you have other similarly capable machines, you may be able to do some 'component testing' to figure out what works and what does not.
Doing this can help you to narrow down the range of components that could be faulty through a process of elimination.

[Dirk Broer]

I do hope you had a Raid arrray, and that it was Raid 5 or 6. But I bet it was, for performance reasons, Raid 0, which means one of your Raid 0 disks, and therefore your complete Raid-array has died on you, because half of the data is on disk A and the other half on disk B, of everything, including OS. Bummer. If it was a Raid 1 array you can repair it (all data is on both disks), Raid 5 and 6 can replicate the lost data to a new disk that has been brought into the array. Then pray that during this process no other disk will die on you in case of Raid 5, because repair will fail in such a case as well. Raid 6 can handle two dead disks.

[Nflight]

Actually no array at all. It was just an extra computer that I still had running and the only one that a GPU would fit into. So at this time I am not idle just limping....Besides I am busy rewriting my business plan till my eyes fall out. so until I can stop and smell some roses it will be awhile till I can get back running again. Just one of those things!

[AMDave]

Give yourself a 20 minute brain break from the creative process

Open the box & have a quick glance at the ends of those Cap's.
I would not power it on again if there is any doubt, to avoid risk of fire.

ok, no raid.
then it is likely the HDD is ok and it is the mobo / HDD controller that has failed.
You can do that quick test by plugging the HDD it into another PC to check on your next break

[Dirk Broer]

From the spare computer cards take the PCI controller card, preferably a model that supports both IDE and SATA. First test the disk in another system, add the controller to that system, install the driver software for the controller on the disk in question and plug the disk plus controller back in the old system. May have to fiddle with your BIOS in order to let the disk start from the new controller.

[AMDave]

OR, if you are bored, take it out back to the fire pit, light that bad boy up and give it a real Viking burial with ale and songs of Odin and Thor! It'd be real proud.

[Dirk Broer]

OR, if you are bored, take it out back to the fire pit, light that bad boy up and give it a real Viking burial with ale and songs of Odin and Thor! It'd be real proud.

Never sell the hide before the bear's been shot. And a mere dead controller on the mobo does not give right to a Viking burial ! After all, we are talking about Nflight's sole GPU-capable mobo here. Dunno what CPU it had, but I would light the fire only if it was an Intel-based sub-conroe socket 775 board (or worse: socket 478 or, dread, socket 423) or a good-old AMD socket A/462 or lower. And you can always use an old mobo to decorate your walls with. The old casing can be re-used with a new mobo, as can the GPU, the optical drive and, hopefully, the hard disk. The old memory might be of the wrong type for a new mobo, but can hopefully be used to soup up other systems.

In case of a new mobo
The green camp
Socket FM1: Make sure to buy a A75 based bord, not a cheaper A55 one.
Socket AM3+: Make sure to have at least a board equipped with the 890FX chipset, but better still a 970 or 990 chipset, in case you want a future upgrade to a Bulldozer.
The blue camp
Socket 1366: Almost given up by Intel itself, no foreseable future in it.
Socket 1556: Given up by Intel itself, no future in it.
Socket 1555: Make sure to have a H67 or Z68 chipset, and go for the i3-2105.

[AMDave]

Aww.
the marshmallows will save for another day.

[Dirk Broer]

...the only one that a GPU would fit into...

Well, is that so? You know you can use GPUs from good-old AGP slots and even plain ordinary PCI slots? I do most of my Collatz (20k+ a day) using a Sapphire 512 Mb AGP HD 3850, and there is a plain PCI (so no PCIe) Club 3D ATI Radeon HD 5450. It will not work fast, but it will work.