Hard drive question.. Dropped Toshiba laptop, will not boot.

BenniUrlaub

Estimable
Dec 26, 2015
7
0
4,510
We have a Toshiba satelite (amd) laptop (I am pretty sure it is windows 8... definitely not 10). It was dropped earlier today, while loading something on to a friend's usb, and now will not boot up all the way.
It starts on the Toshiba screen saying, "repairing", something like that, then goes to a black screen for what seems like forever. Probably, really like 10 minutes. Then it at last brings up a blue screen that has some options on it like "troubleshoot, continue, etc". We have tried a few of the options like "continue"... it just does the same loop. Start up repair .. diagnoses forever then "repairs" forever as well, and goes back to loop. System restore (to an earlier date) says there is no earlier point to restore to.
Other forums and people with other similar issues seem to be getting the answer that they need to reconnect the hard drive or memory modules.
Is this good advice? Is this applicable in my situation? Is this easy to do? Is it recommended to bring in the computer to a tech or is it ok to attempt ourselves?
Thanks in advance for any answers.
 
Hi,

When the laptop was dropped was it on? Chances are the laptops HDD or motherboard might had been damaged. Do try these troubleshooting steps that may help.
- To reseat the RAM here a video tutorial that may help:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6zUqQnvd2s

- To reseat the HDD here's how you do it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW3dvv80Vew

But if the laptop still does boot up you can just run a complete factory reset with it that should solve the problem if the HDD is okay.

How to reset a Toshiba laptop to factory:
https://support.toshiba.com/support/viewContentDetail?contentId=2737864
 

BenniUrlaub

Estimable
Dec 26, 2015
7
0
4,510
LN, thanks.
Yes the laptop was on when it fell.
I watched a tutorial on how to reconnect the hard drive. It looked ok. I really hope it is not broken. We do not have much and that laptop is pretty much the nicest thing we own and I do not think we have a revovery disc.
We reattached the hard drive and are waiting now. We accidentally clicked to start up repair again so that should take a couple hours.

What will reseating the RAM do? Just an educated guess, do you think either of those will be the solution? If the hard drive is broken... is a new one expensive?
 

ffg7

Splendid
Moderator
the hard drive is toast. replaced a customer's hard drive about 2 weeks ago as he accidently swatted the laptop sending it to the floor while the hard drive was spinning. the 1tb drive wasn't even a year old. another customer was vacuum cleaning her living room & snagged her laptop powercord sending the laptop to the floor trashing the drive. in both cases the data was lost.
 

BenniUrlaub

Estimable
Dec 26, 2015
7
0
4,510
Ok.. so it juat said "cannot diagonos... cancel or advanced options". Clicked advanced and then continue to windows and it just went to a black screen again. I don't think that the hard drive connection was it... i will check the ram thing next.
 

BenniUrlaub

Estimable
Dec 26, 2015
7
0
4,510
Ok.. did the ram too. It appears to be doing the same thing. Further info.. the keyboard seems to be working (number and caps lock turn on).. i think the fan works as well. So would the mother board be ok?
If, as FF says, the hard drive is busted.. in replacing that, would I lose all the info?
 

ffg7

Splendid
Moderator
50\50 chance the info is not recoverable but not certain til you try to access it either as external drive or secondary drive. the customer's hard drive that got swatted I can access the info unless I try my data recovery program but customer didn't care about that info.
 

BenniUrlaub

Estimable
Dec 26, 2015
7
0
4,510
Thank you all for your suggestions. Our solution unexpectedly came up and worked. I was not expecting much from your answers. We found our back up windows disc.. we put it in and when the option came up we ran it. It did nothing. We decided that it was unlikely we would get much or any data off so we clicked an option to reset computer. That worked and it booted up the windows reboot disc as well and our computer came back to life. We lost our data, but we are glad to have it up! :D