VGN-AR31S 1 Long + 2 Short

[Gingerninjasan]

Hi All

I believe i may have succum to the NVidia Graphics NSOD (No Screen of Death) that i have read about so much on these forums, the laptop is just over 4 years old so out of the warranty.

I have decided that its time to get a new laptop and i am not too bothered about fixing this issue.

However what i would like to do is be able to at least boot the laptop in some way that i can copy off some data.

To cut a long story short is it possible to boot the laptop once you have heard the 1 Long and 2 Short Beeps.

This is what i have tried so far.

1 - Plugging in an external monitor and boot ?

Result = Still a black screen

2 - This laptop has dual internal hard drives, i removed one and plugged it into a hard disc docking station on another pc hoping to be able to read the disc and copy the data ?

Result = I presume this laptop has a raid setup or something as the drive appears but it says it is not initialised, reading a few other threads i understand that if i initialise the disk it will basically format it.

quite frustrated now, anybody have any suggestions how to get the data off or how to boot the laptop past the bios beeps.

also worth noting due the graphics being broken i cant even get to teh bios settings.

many thanks for any suggestions

[sanicho73]

HELP - has anyone any experinec of this - I have it now (again) on my Sony Vaio AR51SU - why am I a mug who keeps buying them ? ! _ Anyway 2 FUJITSU MHX2250BT hard drives - help please on how to read them from another PC from a dockign station

[Blencogo]

1 long and 2 short indicates a Video failure, so you are probably right.

Your Vaio has 2 hard drives in RAID 0 configuration.  In order to give greater read/write speeds, the system writes to both discs at once.  It writes 128K to one disc and the next 128K to the second disc, the next 128k to the first ........ etc.

This means each individual disc is unreadable as it only contains half the data and if one fails, you lose the lot.  Because of this weakness, the 2 Vaios I have with RAID 0 configurations get backed up regularly to a single external hard drive using Acronis True Image.

In theory, you should be able to read from the 2 discs on another PC AS LONG AS IT HAS THE SAME RAID CONTROLLER but this is not guaranteed.  So you will need to find another system with the same RAID hardware controller and set to RAID 0 in the BIOS.

Your best bet is to find someone with the same model Vaio.