I fell on my computer and now I get a BSOD when Windows is booting

[jbwheels]

I'm disabled and I'm unsteady on my feet, but I had to plug a usb cord into the back of my computer. Unfortunately, I lost my balance and fell on top of the computer. It didn't tip over, but I knocked it to the side about 6" and possibly flexed the case (and motherboard). When I looked at the screen, I saw the BSOD. When I restarted, it began to load Windows. The four pieces of the Windows logo swirled and almost came together, but no, the BSOD popped up before the logo coalesced.

I had just swapped out the SSD, and I copied the partition from the old drive to the new. So they were almost identical. I replaced the new drive with the old and tried booting from the old drive. Exact same result -- BSOD on Windows startup. So it couldn't have been something I loaded on the old drive before copying it to the new drive, or else the new one wouldn't have booted when I put it in.

I tried a safe mode with command line -- same result. I watched the drivers load and delete the last driver loaded -- same result. I tried to repair the Windows installation, and tried a further repair after submitting the results. No dice. This is the info I got:
All error codes were 0x0.
Signature 1 -- 0.0.0.0
Signature 2 -- 6.1.7600.16385
Signature 3 -- unknown
Signature 4 -- 21200084
Signature 5 -- autofailover
Signature 6 -- 4
Signature 7 -- BadPatch

I took the new drive out as is, connected the old drive, and reinstalled Windows. All is working well so far, but I have one big problem, in addition to the hassle of reinstalling all my apps and reconfiguring the settings: I've forgotten the password to an email account, and the only place it's recorded is in my browser.

Please help!
Thanks.

 

[linnemeyerhere]

jbwheels, Welcome to SF. Sorry to hear about your fall and glad that you found a way to get the rig up and running. What email account is it and can you just contact them for the password?

 

[jbwheels]

Unfortunately, no. The only way I could retrieve the password is if I had given an alternate email address. I didn't.

 

[jbwheels]

Well, I was able to recover my password! I copied files from my old drive as explained here:
how do i recover waterfox bookmarks and saved passwords

There are two lesser issues I'd like to solve:
Isn't there likely something wrong with my hardware? I'd like to sort that out.
Is there any way to rescue my old drive or its backup so that I can retain my old apps, data, and configuration? In other words, boot back into my old system?

 

[linnemeyerhere]

Without you taking pictures of the insides to see any damage it's hard to diagnose the issue. To my way of thinking the new hard drive shouldn't be damaged at all as any torquing of the case would put stress on the mobo and unless the cables were crazy tight and just came undone the drives, PSU and other components should have ridden this out fine?

Was the computer running at the time of the fall?

 

[jbwheels]

Since my old drive was not in the machine at the time and exhibits the same problem, I think there has been some damage to the board. I can't think of any other reason for the failure. The machine was on when it happened, and I saw the BSOD when I looked at the display.

I'd like to restore the configurations, apps, and app data from the drive. Maybe all it will take for the app data is some trial and error -- install each app, try to find the appropriate app data folders, and copy them over. A pain, but I don't know if there's a better way.

 

[linnemeyerhere]

Can you post some pictures of the case and the inside to give us a better understanding how things got racked?

 

[jbwheels]

Ok. Get ready for spaghetti -- I've got an 8-drive RAID 50 setup (350 MB/s sustained from WD RE2-GPs. Yeehaw!).

 

[linnemeyerhere]

Sounds great !

 

[jbwheels]

Ok, they turned out terrible. I'm going to have to move some things around for a good shot.

 

[linnemeyerhere]

Got it sorry and the pictures may or may not help but won't hurt, don't fall again !