Dropped laptop help

[Ethanblucher]

Hello, so yesterday I dropped my laptop and I beleive the 1 of the 2 hard drives to be broken. I have a Dv7 that comes with 2 320GB drives set up in raid. I hit f2 when my computer booted and ran a hard drive test and found the drive 1 was broken, it said it failed the short test. I was wondering if anyone could tell me how to check if anything else is broken i worried about the motherboard. I ran every test on my computer and can't find any issues besides hard drive. I am also wondering if i can remove 1 of the 2 drives and just run it with less memory. I also have a gaming desktop so having a all powerfull laptop isn't that important I just need it for my homework in college. Thank you for you're time and sorry if i didn't post this in the right format.

 

[ss202sl]

What was the raid setup? You can run off 1 drive, but if it is part of a raid, it will slow it it down as it tries to find the other drive, but it will work.

Check with you laptop manufacturer and see if there are any diagnostics that you can get, I know dell has some, and can run tests on just about any component - cpu, MB, memory, disks and others.

 

[xFriarx]

It is probably just the HDD, as long as there is not physical damage to the laptop. This would be especially true if the PC was running, and or actively writing/reading from the HDD when you dropped it. Running HDDs are very susceptible to drops/bumps of any kind.

You can just run off of one HDD, (assuming it was set up in Raid 0 for speed) it would just run a little slower and transfers would take more time. You will have to reformat the working HDD and reinstall your OS on the one drive, as half of the information was on the damaged disk (again assuming Raid 0). You will also have to adjust your BIOS settings accordingly to let your PC know to look for a single drive vs a Raid.

 

[Ethanblucher]

It is probably just the HDD, as long as there is not physical damage to the laptop. This would be especially true if the PC was running, and or actively writing/reading from the HDD when you dropped it. Running HDDs are very susceptible to drops/bumps of any kind.

You can just run off of one HDD, (assuming it was set up in Raid 0 for speed) it would just run a little slower and transfers would take more time. You will have to reformat the working HDD and reinstall your OS on the one drive, as half of the information was on the damaged disk (again assuming Raid 0). You will also have to adjust your BIOS settings accordingly to let your PC know to look for a single drive vs a Raid.

If I plug hard drive 2 into hard drive 1 will my recovery disk work properly

 

[xFriarx]

It should, but it depends on how nit-picky the recovery software is. It may not work if it doesn't detect the raid, or if it detects that the single HDD doesn't match the size (in GB) of the raid.