I dropped my laptop and now I get a black screen which reads smart hard disk error hard disk 1 (301

[Jenns84]

I dropped my laptop and now all I get is a black screen which reads smart hard disk  error.  It states that the hard disk check has detected an imminent failure.  Hard disk 1 (301). It passed a memory test,  but says that the hard drive check is unavailable.  What do I have to do to fix it? Will it need to be repaired or is there something I can do myself.  I did reseat the hard drive to no avail.  

[WAWood]

@Jenns84 

You almost certainly trashed the drive, as they are not designed to take that kind of impact.  But you may have done other damage, too.

The drive will need to be replaced, as as minimum.

If you CAN, to find out the problem, you would need to be able run hardware diagnostics by pressing the Esc key repeatedly and then, when the HP Startup Menu appears, select Diagnostics (usually F2) and let it run.

If you can NOT do that, or if that does not work, then there is NOTHING more you can do by yourself -- and there is NOTHING we can do because we have no way of accessing your PC from here to run diagnostics or repair hardware.

[Jenns84]

I feared that.  Which diagnosis should I run? I tried the hard drive test, it said that it was unavailable.  So if that's all I can do,  that's poop. Is there any way of salvaging photos etc? If so,  how,  if not,  does that mean that i would need to buy a new hard drive? Thanks for any information you can give me.  

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@Jenns84 

You would need to consider buying a new drive for the laptop, but you can get 1TB drives for $50 or less these days.

However, if it were mine, I would focus on doing data recovery for now and deal with the replacement drive later.

Your best bet for recovering data now is to do the following:
1) Remove the hard drive from the old PC
2) Purchase a USB-to-Hard Driver adapter kit (like the one illustrated below)

3) Connect the old drive to a working PC using that adapter
4) Try to retrieve the files and folders you want to save from the old drive and copy them to the new PC.

If this does not work, then you need to do the following:
1) Download and install this utility on a working PC http://www.majorgeeks.com/news/story/recover_data_in_3_steps_with_minitool_power_data_recovery_free_...
2) Run the data recovery utility to see what can be retrieved from the old drive.

If that tool does not find what you need, an alternative is Recuva http://www.piriform.com/recuva

And, if that does not work well, the best tool out there is this one, but only the trial version is free http://www.file-recovery.com/

[Jenns84]

Thank you so much for helping me.  I really appreciate it.