Dropped laptop, help?

It is possible your hard-drive may be damaged when it hit the floor. This doesn’t entirely mean you may lose all your data, but you will have to take it to an expert and check it out.

You might want to look inside to see if your drive or memory sticks were jarred loose.

Uh oh. My husband did that, and they could not recover the data. But, when they took the computer to try, they thought they would be able to, so I would at least try to get the data or fix it.

Yeah, use parted magic, its a boot cd, and copy stuff to an external.

What does it go through and what does it stop on?
More details may help here.

@ratboy Totally brilliant answer, and excellent link… look inside. It could be the RAM/memory sticks or just a loose connector between the hard drive and the motherboard. Go to the hardware store and get the necessary eensy weensy philips screwdriver beforehand if you don’t have that on hand.
Have on hand a small container to put those tiny screws so you don’t lose them.
Take pics while disassembing if have any doubt you’ll remember where to put stuff back.

While it’s booting do you get any indication of the usual memory test? Or do you have to push a special key to get the boot messages? If you can get the boot post messages you may be able to tell if the RAM sticks are just fine, or not.

Was it on when you dropped it ? If it was off there is a better chance the hard drive would survive because it would have parked its heads. It is possible your laptop even has a accelerometer/G-force sensor that could detect falling and park the heads before it hits the floor, but not sure if that model has that feature, a lot of laptops don’t.

Have fun! Good luck!