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Guest Nik

Dropped Laptop

5 posts in this topic

Guest Nik

So someone tripped over my laptop charger cord and dropped my laptop from dresser height the other day onto hard floor. There is minor cosmetic damage but when I tried using it wasnt responsive. Upon restart the computer took ages to boot up. After booting for about 2 mins as opposed to the 15 seconds, and after about 20 mins of usage the speed of the computer picks up again. By speed I mean hard drive function related speed such as copying files etc. So I am concerned that my hard-drive got damaged. The ram is read at the normal amt, nothing got dislodged, and the processor has clocked to max speed fine. I can't think of anything else but the hard drive and I plan on getting a replacement, and cloning it. Do you think its not a good idea to clone? Any further suggestions or things I should be concerned about. Everything else seems to be a-ok.

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So someone tripped over my laptop charger cord and dropped my laptop from dresser height the other day onto hard floor. There is minor cosmetic damage but when I tried using it wasnt responsive. Upon restart the computer took ages to boot up. After booting for about 2 mins as opposed to the 15 seconds, and after about 20 mins of usage the speed of the computer picks up again. By speed I mean hard drive function related speed such as copying files etc. So I am concerned that my hard-drive got damaged. The ram is read at the normal amt, nothing got dislodged, and the processor has clocked to max speed fine. I can't think of anything else but the hard drive and I plan on getting a replacement, and cloning it. Do you think its not a good idea to clone? Any further suggestions or things I should be concerned about. Everything else seems to be a-ok.

Don't use the machine, buy an external HDD enclosure for the drive (USB 3) and get a new HDD of equal or greater capacity. Look into a cloner that can either run from USB, is that will run on machine boot. However, I'd actually advise 2 external enclosures, and you use a surrogate machine and run cloning software from USB to USB. That'll give you easier monitoring of any errors on the original drive, and any unrecoverable data.

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The safest bet is to connect it to a desktop, boot it up with the damaged HDD in read-only and clone all the files.

Or kill the fucker that tripped over your cord and steal his money to get yourself a new ultrabook.

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Guest Nik

Well the thing is I can use the laptop just fine rn for basic functions, like I am using it right now. Its just that the boot time is ridiculous and games lag a bit and im guessing the hard drive will fail in the future. I purchased the same exact hard drive and a usb 3.0 to SATA cord and im sure I can find some free trial cloning software online. Could I just connect the fresh HDD to this machine and use cloning software and then just replace? And is there any software I can use to check for disk errors rn? HP system diagnostics had a SMART test and I have no idea what the heck that is but i ran it and it showed no errors on the hard drive. Hard disk sentinel shows 100% hard drive health and nothing out of the blue. But i think it has to be the hard drive, what else could cause an abnormal boot time and whatnot.

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Well the thing is I can use the laptop just fine rn for basic functions, like I am using it right now. Its just that the boot time is ridiculous and games lag a bit and im guessing the hard drive will fail in the future. I purchased the same exact hard drive and a usb 3.0 to SATA cord and im sure I can find some free trial cloning software online. Could I just connect the fresh HDD to this machine and use cloning software and then just replace? And is there any software I can use to check for disk errors rn? HP system diagnostics had a SMART test and I have no idea what the heck that is but i ran it and it showed no errors on the hard drive. Hard disk sentinel shows 100% hard drive health and nothing out of the blue. But i think it has to be the hard drive, what else could cause an abnormal boot time and whatnot.

HD Tune Pro can scan a drive very effectively. I can send you a link if you like. Also, I could link you to some aggressive yet effective disk cloning software if necessary, but I believe you'd have to install it on the machine as it is, running it in safe mode, or run both the new and old disk through USB with a surrogate laptop performing the copy (which is what I think my dad did about 4 years ago for a 320GB drive that took about 6 hours due to serious errors on the disk.) Do note that load times were exceptionally slow on that machine, but nothing obvious was popping up until the cloning software was run as to whether there were issues.

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