Hard Drive Error

[AmbitiousWomen]

I dropped my laptop yesterday and now a hard drive error is on my laptop start up. What can I do? 

[WAWood]

@AmbitiousWomen 

Consumer laptops are not designed to survive being dropped -- and as you have discovered, that nearly always result in the hard drive being trashed.

You will have to replace the drive.

Once you have that drive, you will need to restore your laptop to working condition.  If your PC is a 2016 model or newer, you should see if you can make a bootable USB recovery drive using the HP cloud recovery tool on a working PC.

The recovery drive can then be used to install Win10 and the HP drivers and utilities that originally came with your PC.

Here is the link: https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06162205

[AmbitiousWomen]

Thank you so much @WAWood for this information. Next I would like to ask you where can I purchase this very hard drive from and roughly how much will it cost me? 

[ieee488]

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@AmbitiousWomen wrote:

Next I would like to ask you where can I purchase this very hard drive from and roughly how much will it cost me? 

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I would purchase a SSD.

Best Buy has the 1 TB Samsung for $140 on sale this week.

.

[WAWood]

@AmbitiousWomen 

How much you want to spend is up to you, but understand that while SSDs are faster than HDDs, they typically cost twice as much.

Plus, unless you really NEED the space, a 500GB drive is more than ample.  I have had a 500GB SSD in my HP laptop for 5 years now and it never comes close to running out of space.

But again, it is your money -- and your choice.

Any reputable online source is OK, typically places like BestBuy or even Walmart.