Disk error when laptop is turned on

Hello,


I have a Dell Inspiron laptop with windows 7 Home 64 bit. Few days ago the laptop was accidentally fallen to floor while it was still powered on. When I noticed this, the laptop was little hot to the touch at the place the hard disk was located and it was shut down. I restarted the laptop. I got the error "Hard disk not found .Try to reseat the hard drive." I reseated the hard drive and checked in the BIOS that hard drive is detected. BIOS shows the hard drive correctly. But the laptop won't boot to my windows7. But I get the options Repair disk and Start windows normally. I tried bot but nothing happens. The laptop restarts and the same options come up everytime. I am not much knowledgeable person with computers and os, so I think I made lot of mistakes when I tried to restore my laptop. Here is what I did.

1. First I immediately tried Dell datasafe and Backup that was in the menu shown after booting. I selected to backup my files first, It said some pictures available. I wanted to see what available so I selected Advanced selection. But it took very long and was just scanning and nothing happened. I wasn't sure what's happening so I went back and this time I selected to backup without clicking on Advanced and decided not to touch the laptop until the scanning is complete. I left it scanning for one day and it was still scanning. I wasn't sure what to do, so I turned off the laptop.


2. I started the computer again, and I selected Last knows good configuration from the menu. The laptop restarted with same repair disk message.


3. I restarted again hit F8 while booting but how many times I try the F8 options menu won't appear and the laptop gives beep sound and flashing cursor.


4. I read somewhere that I can still backup my files by using a disk enclosure and using the hard drive as external disk with another computer. When I first connected this HD to another computer via USB I could see two volumes on this external HD, one RECOVERY and another Local Disk in the windows explorer. I tried to open these volumes but the computer was not responding almost for 30 minutes so I pulled it out from the USB slot without safely ejecting first. Not sure if I damaged the HD more by pulling it out. I connected it again, this time no system hanging and the Recovery volume was 4.6 GB used with some files. But the Local Disk volume was 0bytes used and 0 bytes free and when I tried to access it asked to Format the disk first.


5. So to recover files from the corrupt Local disk volume I used couple of softwares from internet. One software was for only files I guess and it showed only the RECOVERY volume. So I didn't use it. Another software was for recovering the partition and it showed the partition as 290GB. I selected this to recover, but the scanning continued for many hours, so I cancelled the process.


6. When I reseated the HD in my laptop, I now get the error "Disk error. Press Ctrl Alt Delete to reRecovery.

I have no clue what I should do now. I appreciate any help to backup my files first and then repair my OS.

thanks

Why would you try to Factory Recover a laptop you dropped?

Dell has built in Diagnostics which should be the first thing done to check over the hardware. Tap the F12 key at boot and run the Diagnostics, then run the fuller suite if its available on Utility Partition. It will tell you which hardware is bad. If it can't run then the HD is bad and needs replacing.

I would upgrade to a SSD which is the best upgrade you can get nowdays. 120gb is coming down around $50 on New Egg, Best Buy and Amazon. You can google a video for your model which shows how to replace with SSD.

Thanks for the reply.

I have run the Diagnostics and SATA disk failed with error 2000:0146. I run the Extended Test too and the SATA Confidence test failed with error 0F00:1344 and Read Test failed with error 0F00:0244. Both error messages "DISK - Block 6336529: Can't read, replace disk."

I understand I need to replace the hard drive. But is there any chances I can still retrieve some personal files from this disk with any software? I appreciate any help.