ASUS ROG G751JM start malfunction

[crenzi]

Hi, I bought this thing a few weeks ago from Amazon, used. I came up with windows 8.1, but I never paid attention to the brand or the version of the system. Now I regret it.

Yesterday I dropped the pc from about a foot high. At the moment there it seemed that nothing had happened, and merrily continued to play. However, this morning I tried to get it started and I received a disturbing message: something about a device not found or not available and the error code 0xC0000185.

The message added that you had to try to start the system from a boot disk, so I went to the site of Microsoft, created an installation usb for Windows 8.1 from Windows Help and tried to start it from there, choosing to start the usb key as bootable.

After the ROG logo, black screen. Forever.

I then dug out the hard disk and connected it to a device that makes it work like an external hard drive, discovering that:
It crackles somewhat
Reports a capacity of half a terabyte, whereas the label marks it as a tera HDD, which shows me that it's using a single partition.
It appears empty.

Now, does this mean that the hard disk is to be thrown away? Are there other things to try? How the hell do I put on a windows if I do not have a physical copy of the operating system?

Please please help.

Thanks

 

[popatim]

The harddrive is shot. You need to get a new one.
Your laptop has the Windows Authenticity code built into the motherbd and usually the installation will check there for it. You may run into a problem matching the correct version of windows to what you had. If you run into trouble just contact Asus and purchase a restore usb or disk set which can be used to return it to the factory state.

 

[crenzi]

I feared as much. Thanks

 

[crenzi]

The harddrive is shot. You need to get a new one.
Your laptop has the Windows Authenticity code built into the motherbd and usually the installation will check there for it. You may run into a problem matching the correct version of windows to what you had. If you run into trouble just contact Asus and purchase a restore usb or disk set which can be used to return it to the factory state.

There is something that still bothers me though: after the drop the computer kept working fine for the entire evening. It was only in the morning that it stopped working. This led me to believe that the cause of the malfunction was to be found in some driver installation that occurred when I turned off the PC.

Can you tell me if there is a way to check the HDD to see if I can salvage it?

Thanks again