Macbook display randomly garbles. Corrects for a while when I plug in an external monitor. What's up?

I have a late 2011 Macbook Pro that has some random display issues. 
1. The laptop display will put a 1-inch black bar down the screen and shift everything to the right.  It fixes itself for a while when I plug an external monitor into the mini-display port, but then does the black bar thing again.
2. Screen just totally garbles and I have to do a hard restart. Plugging in the external monitor seems to correct this for a while, too.....
I went into System Settings and unchecked the box so that it would only use the discrete graphics, and it doesn't help.
Failing GPU?  Discrete or on-board? I'm guessing failing discrete GPU......
Thanks for any help!
Joe

Hi.
PC disks should be FAT32 formatted as they come and if you out the disk into an external drive enclosure be it USB or Firewire, your iMac should be able to mount it and read it.
If you want to use this "re-convert" hard drive as your "permanent" external drive for your iMac and nothing else, I would advise you to reformat the disk to the GUID format (partition), which is recommended for all Intel Macs, because they read and write to external drives a little differently from their PPC counterparts.
Here's the link to how to reformat/re-partition a drive to GUID:
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/apple/leopard-disk-utility-format-issue-screws-with-t ime-machine-but-theres-an-easy-fix-316573.php
Cheers

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