Friend dropped laptop

[Stiganator]

My friend dropped his laptop. Well it wouldn't boot so I loaded up Bart PE and did a chkdsk. There were 4 sectors that were unreadable and it fixed a few errors. It will boot now, but I told him he should probably get a new drive because the physical damage to the drive may make it unstable in the long term. Would you agree?

 

[mrjminer]

Yah. If he dropped it and it got some unreadable sectors after that/wouldn't boot, there could be some physical damage to the mechanical functionality of the drive itself. Maybe it would work fine for a while, but it would probably start giving errors and bad sectors prior to when it would have should he not have dropped the drive. Also, increased risk of it dying altogether, of course.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Definitely, if it's showing bad sectors it may be physically damaged. They need to back up every file they care about immediately, including IE bookmarks and their email database.

Get a new drive and a cheap external enclosure for the old drive to make migration a little easier.

 

[MichaelD]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
Definitely, if it's showing bad sectors it may be physically damaged. They need to back up every file they care about immediately, including IE bookmarks and their email database.

Get a new drive and a cheap external enclosure for the old drive to make migration a little easier.

I agree. Your friend is lucky you were able to get the thing to boot even once. Laptop drives are notoriously delicate. Go with what Dave said.

 

[superHARD]

LOL, I'm sure your friend already had his stuff backed up?...right?

 

[Stiganator]

I backed it up for him with my handy dandy IDE/SATA/latopIDE to USB adapter.

 

[Agentbolt]

Those things are awesome. I really need to get one. Unbelievably handy.

 

[Stiganator]

Probably the most useful piece of hardware I have.

 

[Agentbolt]

Which one do you have? Apparently some models work a lot better than others.