Question Dropping PC resulted in constant black screen of death

nss.maes

Commendable
Feb 8, 2019
9
0
1,510
I dropped my PC on it's side yesterday (silly me) and it shut off soon afterwards. The PC ran fine before this except for the occasional overheating of my CPU thanks to a janky heatsink which sometimes came lose and I had to force in place from time to time.
A couple of strange things happened after it fell over and I tried restarting multiple times, firstly a message popped up asking for a disk check, which it then said couldn't do properly because of "an error caused by a recently installed softwarepackage" and recommending system repair to go back to a previous point in time so it can do this diskcheck thing (something along those lines, I'm translating from my mother tongue), after this it went to a black screen of death, you know the black screen except for a working mouse cursor. Then I rebooted again and this time it asked for a disk check again without error, which I let it do, but nothing actually happened except for showing the black screen of death. After waiting on this screen for about 3 hours (me thinking it was actually doing the disk check) I shut it down and rebooted. But everytime I reboot now all I get is a black screen of death, sometimes it asks for a disk check, sometimes doesn't, but everytime it ends with the windows logo and then going to a black screen with only a functioning mouse cursor.

Internet told me that the black screen of death has something to do with GPU so I tried different things with and without the GPU to see if my integrated graphics of my CPU would give any results.

These are the different solutions I found online that I tried but, to no avail:

hdmi to gpu, launched in safe mode
hdmi to gpu, launched with "config of last successful launch"
hdmi to gpu launched with "640x480 resolution"

hdmi to mobo, launched in safe mode
hdmi to mobo, launched with "config of last successful launch"
hdmi to mobo, launched with "640x480 resolution"

resetting bios

As far as I can tell all the visible wires are connected and properly in place, although a lot of the wires that go around the back I haven't checked extensively.

specs if necessary:
GPU gtx 1080
CPU i7 4770k
MOBO msi powermax z87
RAM 8gb corsair
PSU evga 750 g2

If anybody has any good suggestions of what I could change/check/do I'd very much appreciate it
 

Ralston18

Titan
Moderator
The fall broke something.

What type of drive is installed? If a HDD then it is very likely that physical damage occurred within the drive. Further attempts to use the computer and drive may lead to more damage inside the drive. With accompanying loss of data.

The error messages you are seeing certainly suggest hard drive damage. You may be able to confirm that by using the applicable disk drive diagnostic software available via the drive's manufacturer. Again running a diagnostic may cause further damage.

However, there could also be other damage in ways not immediately visible. The fall may have cracked loose some component(s) on the motherboard or perhaps even cracked one of the circuit traces.

Could be damage in other components. E.g., PSU, the GPU, fans,

About all you can do is test each component, one by one, in other known working computers. If all work then the motherboard would be suspect.

You must do the testing very methodically and carefully while keeping track of what works and what does not work.
 

nss.maes

Commendable
Feb 8, 2019
9
0
1,510
Thanks for the quick response.

I should've probably mentioned it in the OP, but yes, there is a HDD inside of my PC. Tomorrow I'll heed your advice and test the components, HDD first.
 
Last edited:

nss.maes

Commendable
Feb 8, 2019
9
0
1,510
So I thought my parents still had a working PC I could test all the components with, but unfortunately their pc is a piece of <Mod Edit> that hasn't worked properly since 2010 so that's not really an option.

I tinkered around a bit more and I don't think it's the hard drive. I should've mentioned it in the OP but there's an SSD in there aswell, and I assume the OS is installed on the SSD because with just the SSD connected it doesn't boot me constantly to the BIOS but gives me the black screen of death again. So I'll assume that the hard drive isn't the problem, probably not the PSU either (its made out steel or some really tough shit), nothing wrong with both sticks of RAM. Could it either be CPU (I'm hesitant to take it apart because of the janky heatsink that doesn't connect properly mentioned in the op), the SSD, in which case I searched around and found I could get linux or ubuntu in a usb stick and try that, or the motherboard which would suck.

Please poke holes in my assumption, tell me how retarded I am and help me out, I don't know much about computers. Should I just get a IT technician dude to come around, or what else could I try without paying money or something that doesn't need a different system to check all my components?

Thanks
 
Last edited by a moderator:

nss.maes

Commendable
Feb 8, 2019
9
0
1,510
So, I got ubuntu on a USB stick and booted from there and the computer actually shows more than just a cursor this time, a fully working, albeit pretty slowly version of ubuntu. I'm guessing this means my SSD with my windows on it is the component that's broken, but as I said before, no expert in these things. If any professional can tell me if I'm right in my hypothesis (or any other ideas) and I just need to replace the SSD that would be appreciated.