Dropped laptop, been in Startup Repair for hours.

[sealilly]

Hello all, dropped laptop today while it was running and surprisingly i was able to continue using it and finished tasks. Was the next boot up when I could not get past the Startup Repair. Been going now about 3 hours. Just curious how long I wait with a 750gb HDD? I have a new HDD to install, but of course would much rather not replace if not required.

Side note if I do swap out HDD, can I simply register existing OS with sticker on laptop?

 

[boosted1g]

The mbr or partition table or other data in the beginning of drive likely got damaged from the drop.

Does the drive make any clicking sounds?

If there is a Win 7 (or older) license key on your laptop you can install a generic copy of windows to your pc.
You will need to download drivers from the OEM, as your wifi, audio, and other hardware will not work with the generic windows drivers.

 

[DeadlyDays]

you could try repairing the partition table via TestDisk, but if it was dropped then likely a hardware issue and you'd want to replace the HDD.

 

[sealilly]

Thank you all, for reliability (and paranoia) I will swap out drive and reload.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there sealilly,

I would agree with the other guys and say that there could be something wrong with the HDD, as the process takes so long.
My suggestion would be to access the drive with some data recovery tool for DOS mode and try to recover the data. You can check the Ubunu Live CD approach out: http/www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/267999-32-recover-data-mode
Alternatively, you can attach the drive as a secondary one to another system and see if you will be able to access the data right away. In that case, you will be able to use some OS based data recovery tool as well: http/www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html

After that, you can just test the drive and see what is wrong with it: http/www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility

Let us know how this goes,
D_Know_WD