So after a few software downloads, Skype, Google Earth, Opera, nothing sinister at all, I restarted to refresh my system and have experienced yet another complete crash where I get a black or purple screen of complete inactivity.

This notebook comes with a 750GB hard drive and a 24GB SSD. Did I possibly do something to mess up partitions and make this computer inoperable?

After a bunch of issues, I formatted both drives to wipe Windows 8 and to give me a fresh platform for an install and really have had no end of problems. I'm a noob so I'm starting to suspect I've done something quite wrong and am in over my head.

There is a RAID on this computer, could that be it? I will now begin to research this and will do a boot repair from a thumbdrive, but any advice would be quite welcomed. Thanks.