So, I've had my Area51 M7700 for a little over 3yrs, and its been a total POS for most of that time, but I've been able to bring it back each time its failed (2 vid cards, one lcd screen, a cd drive, 2 hdds)
So, I recently had some strange happenings that I was able to narrow down to the hard drive array (mostly because after beating down every other possibility the drive(s) finally failed enough to show up as degraded in the array, and they were giving audible signs of complete failure), and ordered two new drives for the laptop---seems all of the original 7200rpm ide drives that came with this unit are discontinued and out of stock everywhere, so I replaced the drives with a pair of hitachi travelstars, 160GB, 5400rpm...
I recreated my array (mirrored this time, as I've tanked my striped set twice now, and with the added storage capacity, I'm comfortable with the performance it), and started the windows installation...........this is where things get screwy:
loaded the raid drivers, went through the opening screens and created a new partition, and set it to format ntfs (not quick since this is a new driveset), and walked away. When I came back to check on it, the screen was filled with textual garbage (see attached pics); I took the photos, restarted the laptop, and used another cd, thinking I had a bad setup cd (also ended up swapping the ram just to eliminate the possibility of the problem returning), but when I rebooted, I received the same garbage, but well before I got to the setup screens (it actually happened on the loading status page for the raid card, so its not cd related, and definitely not a problem with the OS load itself.)
I've been working on pcs for years and have never seen a display like this at this point...anyone else had a similar situation or suggestions?
Gil
So, I recently had some strange happenings that I was able to narrow down to the hard drive array (mostly because after beating down every other possibility the drive(s) finally failed enough to show up as degraded in the array, and they were giving audible signs of complete failure), and ordered two new drives for the laptop---seems all of the original 7200rpm ide drives that came with this unit are discontinued and out of stock everywhere, so I replaced the drives with a pair of hitachi travelstars, 160GB, 5400rpm...
I recreated my array (mirrored this time, as I've tanked my striped set twice now, and with the added storage capacity, I'm comfortable with the performance it), and started the windows installation...........this is where things get screwy:
loaded the raid drivers, went through the opening screens and created a new partition, and set it to format ntfs (not quick since this is a new driveset), and walked away. When I came back to check on it, the screen was filled with textual garbage (see attached pics); I took the photos, restarted the laptop, and used another cd, thinking I had a bad setup cd (also ended up swapping the ram just to eliminate the possibility of the problem returning), but when I rebooted, I received the same garbage, but well before I got to the setup screens (it actually happened on the loading status page for the raid card, so its not cd related, and definitely not a problem with the OS load itself.)
I've been working on pcs for years and have never seen a display like this at this point...anyone else had a similar situation or suggestions?
Gil
