Dropped laptop, hard drive is not detected anymore

[Bonhomme]

I have a Toshiba Satellite a66i0-0t4 with windows 8.1 running on it.

The laptop was running when I dropped it, and when I picked it up a huge " : ( " face showed up and it said that it was sending an error report or something, and then will restart itself automatically. However it never restarted after leaving it on for 15-20 minutes, so I forced it off by holding the power button.

I turned the laptop back on again to see that it worked fine for the first few minutes. After a while explorer.exe stopped working, but the cursor and other programs were working. I ctrl+alt+del and then it "froze" on the new screen, but the cursor was still working. I had to force it off again because the computer would not respond.

The next time I turned it on, it only showed a black screen with a blinking cursor, and then it said "media test failure, check cable...boot failed" and it also does not show anything under the hdd/ssd section of the boot menu.

I checked online and it said to remove the harddrive and put it back in, but even after doing so I'm stuck at the same place. Any help will be appreciated

 

[ThatVietGuy]

Since it was running when you dropped it you probably irreparably damaged the hard drive. Only solution is to buy a new hard drive and reinstall Windows to get it running again.

 

[Bonhomme]

Since it was running when you dropped it you probably irreparably damaged the hard drive. Only solution is to buy a new hard drive and reinstall Windows to get it running again.

But it was working for a while right after I restarted the first time. Does that mean anything or is that just wishful thinking on my part.

 

[ThatVietGuy]

Well, the fact that it deteriorated to the point where it says "media test failure" and doesn't boot anymore kinda points to a dead hard drive.

 

[Bonhomme]

UPDATE: Now when I try turning it on, it goes all the way to the windows loading screen, but is now stuck at the part with the windows logo and spinning circle things.

 

[ThatVietGuy]

I still contend you have a dead hard drive.

 

[Novadawn]

Well a few months ago I had almost exact same issue. Was told hard drive was kaput (which I believe was correct) and had a new hard drive installed. Since then my computer has not been the same. The hardware configuration was f***** up - feather touch buttons either not responding or performing wrong function, loss of gesture control, upon start up it asks me if I want to run windows 7 or windows 7 home premium but will not run home premium, cannot get the bluetooth function to run - and there are programmes that must have been inc. in the original system that were no longer there.. web cam for example was very poor quality. Yet as far as I could tell it was the Toshiba factory version. My point is, if you change your hard drive try to be super aware of what you have going on in your system configuration before hand so you can get it back to how it was before. Mine is a shadow of its former self, yet I do not have the expertise to fix it all up.. even though I know it must be something to do with the software and configuration.

 

[modernwar99]

When I reinstalled Windows on my laptop the buttons like the volume, wifi, and power saving mode didn't work until I installed the drivers for them. Also most of the software that comes preinstalled is all bloatware or useless... Only thing I lost was an OEM copy of MS Office. You might have to install webcam drivers again for them to function completely.