Blue screen after a drop/fall, What should I do?

[uberman]

My computer slipped off couch and fell 30 inches to the carpet below. Now i have the infamous blue screen on my Lenovo T61 laptop running WIN-XP.

I'm guessing its a hard drive issue. I'll make a copy of my saved install on to a new hard drive and hopefully I'll be up and running. However, that may not be it.

Should I make a bootable CD to diagnose my problem. What kind of bootable diagnostic ISO disc should I make to figure this out? Any suggestions would be appreciated and/or should I troubleshoot this another way.

Thank you in advance for any advice.

 

[Burpo]

. I'll make a copy of my saved install on to a new hard drive and hopefully I'll be up and running.

That's it. Hard drives don't like impacts while running..

 

[Blain]

Using a SSD, you could have dropped it until the screen cracked.

 

[denis280]

Using a SSD, you could have dropped it until the screen cracked.

Don't try this at home kids

 

[ArtShapiro]

While I agree with the others, I'll raise the question as to whether you installed the Lenovo "active drive protection" on your hard drive. For T series machines without an SSD, it seems like one indispensable amongst the myriad of available Thinkpad software addons.

Have you tried booting the machine off a DVD or CD?

Art

 

[piasabird]

Well you might try opening the case and see if everything is still seated well like RAM, VIDEO CARD, ETC. Hard drives hate to be bumped when they are running. Could cause file corruption. If it is the windows ini file, it can make the hard drive SYS not detectable by the COMPUTER MOTHERBOARD. This is probably fixable. My son fixed his one time, but it can be a pain. Usually if this happens you get some odd message like no operating system found or something like that.

 

[DesiPower]

My computer slipped off couch and fell 30 inches to the carpet below. Now i have the infamous blue screen on my Lenovo T61 laptop running WIN-XP.

I'm guessing its a hard drive issue. I'll make a copy of my saved install on to a new hard drive and hopefully I'll be up and running. However, that may not be it.

Should I make a bootable CD to diagnose my problem. What kind of bootable diagnostic ISO disc should I make to figure this out? Any suggestions would be appreciated and/or should I troubleshoot this another way.

Thank you in advance for any advice.

Try Linux live CD thing, you can do it from USB drives, all top distros support the feature. I can recommend Mint or Ubuntu

 

[Ketchup]

My computer slipped off couch and fell 30 inches to the carpet below. Now i have the infamous blue screen on my Lenovo T61 laptop running WIN-XP.

So, you dropped the laptop, after which it went to a blue screen?

I know everyone wants to say your hard drive is toast, and it could be, but how would Windows have time to give you an error if the hard drive died on impact? I'd think it would have frozen if the drive died. Maybe Windows loads everything it needs for that into RAM.

Uberman, what happens when you turn the laptop back on?

 

[corkyg]

Ketchup79 raises good points to consider. Several years ago, while clearing TSA at the Charlottesville, VA airport, my Lenovo T60 fell a good 36-inches to the concrete floor. It was closed and off. I thought for sure it was an "Aw s----" moment.

As soon as I gathered up my stuff, I went to the lounge and examined the T60. No visible damage. So, I turned it on and it booted right up and that was that. The soft rubber rails on the T60's HDD caddy did their job. But, . . . it was not running when it fell.

 

[uberman]

SHORT ANSWER: Hard Drive was bad.

I replaced the hard drive on my T61 and cloned from a HD that I keep for backup. Diskwizard for Seagate HDs comes with a version of Acronis True Image so when I buy a computer I clone it to the largest laptop HD that I can get and place the original in storage. In about 90 minutes allowing for physical hardware and USB swapping I'd fixed it. Thanks for your replys. I think I owed you guys an end to this story.

Because of my lack of mobility. I was ill. I was able to revive 3 dead laptops though. The damaged HD, one cracked display and three password recoveries.

For password recovery I used the editor that was reccomended to me (Offline Windows Password and registry editor @ http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/). It did not work on 2 of the three, so I used OPH Crack to recover passwords. Of course OPH Crack did not work on one of them so the other editor was useful.

Sorry for the tardy reply. I was ill.

 

[DesiPower]

so you are looking at posts that more than a month old?

 

[Blain]

so you are looking at posts that more than a month old?

It's an update on his original post.
A month old is nothing around here. People reply to threads that are years old.

 

[ronitbajaj]

I think, You must show to hardware professional.