I have an alienware area-51 7700 laptop that is about 4 years old. The laptop has two 40 GB hard drives that are configured in a raid 0 configuration. Recently, I've been having serious hard drive issues. About 50% of the time, when I power on the laptop, the system will get past the BIOS screen and then hang, even though the hard drive activity light is on. I normally cannot hear any hard drive activity during this time, but it is hard to detect anyway because of the volume of the fans. Sometimes, after powering the system on and off a few times, I will receive the "Operating system not found" message, after letting the system sit for a few minutes with the behavior mentioned above. About 30% of the time, the system will boot normally. However, after a few minutes, especially if running large applications, the system will hang. Infrequently, I will get a blue screen error. (Infrequently enought where I have not written down the error.) About 20% of the time, the system will boot normally and continue to function perfectly for several hours throughout my business day. I had started to try to replace the hard drives with a single non-raid hard drive. The system saw the new hardware, but hung as I was installing the operating system on the new hard drive. This is why I suspect it may be the motherboard, and not a hard drive issue. If the problem might be with the motherboard, is there anything specific I should be looking for? Thanks in Advance.

When you attempted to install the OS on the single drive did you reconfigure the BIOS setting to reflect a non RAID boot? My first guess would be the drives are overheating. The whole Laptop could be overheating too, which would affect the controllers. Install a temperature monitoring utility an see if things are getting hot. Could also simply be data corruption. I hope you use that laptop strictly for gaming. RAID0 is a sure way to lose your person data.

Thanks for responding. Yes, I reconfigured from RAID to non-RAID when I attempted to install the OS on the single drive. I was ruling out heading because the problem manifests itself regardless of if the system has been on for hours or if it has been turned off over night and is just being turned on.

Are the drives SATA? Just reread your original post. Are you running a business using this laptop?

No. The hard drives are not SATA. ATA. (This is a 4 year old laptop) I'm a contract programmer. I do programming using this laptop.

Why in the world are you using RAID0 then? I suggest the first thing you do is off load all your personal files to a reliable place. Then download the correct hard drive fitness test for your brand of drives. Run it to find out if there is a problem with the drives. After you do that post back with a report.