Had a TinyXP build on there, wife had loads of stuff on there (she hadn't backed up despite my warnings ) and dropped it onto a tiled floor. Battery popped out when it landed. It was on. Couldn't see the drive from Ubuntu, but eventually managed to chkdsk it and got 99% of her files back, but there is a scattering of corrupt files that don't matter for data recovery (the odd crap photo and download).

Reformat, reinstall and see how it goes but not put anything important on it? I would have thought with a head crash the whole thing would be toast.

 

All depends on what damage has been done mate.
I've dropped a fair few laptops in my line of work and had some work fine after and others completely destroyed. You may be lucky but I would certainly buy a new HDD and use that instead if your finding files are corrupt, probably a bad sector on the HDD.

What happened when you put it back together and turned it back on? BSOD?

 

A quick and dirty check is to Download and install speedfan (not sure if it works on unbuntu, so maybe pop the drive into a windows machine, run as administrator if its vista or Win7) Website: http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php Download from here: http://www.almico.com/speedfan445.exe

Then go to the 'SMART' tab, and select the according hard drive from the drop down menu.

It'll give you the raw statistics of that drive....what is important is the re-allocated sector count. This is very important as the hard drive has 'spare' sectors, bit like a spare tyre on a car, if a sector goes bad, it re-allocates the data that would have been stored there to a spare sector. The start value is usually 100, and it counts down with every reallocation normally on a old drive you will see around 96, if its anything close to 10 its not got long left before it dies. Anything above 80 is acceptable really - just re check it every few days/weeks to make sure its not getting worse, if it is, its on its way out.

When these spare sectors run out, the hard drive dies - along with the data on it as the drive will try to read/write to the dead/damaged sector. When this happens it'll probably make some weird clunking/clicking noises.

Click 'perform an in-depth online anaysis' button to get a more user freindly version of the data you see on a webpage (you'll need an internet connection for this).



Now for the proper way...this is to do a full surface scan. To do this you should run a hard drive diagnostics program. The best one to use is usually what is supplied by the drive manufacturer (go to their website). But usually programs from other manufacturers work. For example seatools: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/sup...loads/seatools

This will take a while, but it will give you a thumbs up/down outcome of the drive's health.

 

Thanks!