So... can my laptop be fixed?

[ReservoirAngel]

The other day, I accidentally dropped my laptop. Not a big drop cause I was sitting on my bed at the time, but it landed kind of awkwardly.

And now it won't start. It goes through the Compaq starting screen, but after that it just displays a blank screen with a single blinking underscore in the top right hand corner. It just flashed that forever! Seriously, it never stops.

What's more, on the Compaq start-up screen all the "Press F-whatever for whatever option" except the "F11 for System Recovery". That one doesn't work, and its the only one I need that could fix this. Sure I'd lose everything, but its better than getting it repaired at a shop having them discover my porn when its fixed.

So since I know nothing of computers, I'm hoping someone here does. So... any way this issue can be fixed without the need for a professional repair job.

P.S: After being an idiot and fucking around with some of the settings through those start-up menus, I managed to get it briefly to, instead of just the flashing underscore, display the message:

"NVIDIA Boot Agent 249.0542"

And it just displays that over and over again along with the NVIDIA trademark information.

 

[Deleted]

Open the back and check if anything is loose. It could be that the hard drive is loose though I'm not a computer whiz so I don't know. I can't even tell you what the graphics card is.

Try putting in a boot CD that may have came with the laptop. Then go to the settings you went in before and make the computer boot from the CD instead of itself. This is what I did to save my computer from a blue screen (a notorious one caused by a vista update, thanks Microsoft!)

I'm sorry I can't help you more, but maybe that's a starting point.

 

[Maya Posch]

Could be a HDD crash. Together with the LCD screen it's usually the first thing to break in a laptop

Can hook up the HDD to another system to verify.

 

[Cpt. Red]

If you aren't the kind of guy that would consider building you own computer or upgrading it I would suggest that you bring it to someone who knows.
It doesn't sound to bad tough... Maybe something needs to be replaced or something just came loose...

 

[zeonz]

sounds like your HDD crashed. ( or isen't connected properly ).
it's probably trying to read your hdd, or part of it and doesen't get a respons ( or 1 it cannot use ).

on most laptops you can screw open the part where the HDD is and just take it out, and put it back in. or put it in another pc to check if you can read any data from it.

the nvidia part probably is a chipset on your motherboard, so that doesen't realy matters in this case.

as for your porn, there technicly not allowed to go look for it ( so they'd have to find it by accident ). and as long as it's not childporn/(animalporn) there's nothing illigal from it. and don't forget that it's confidential information ( or at least it should be treated as that ). which means that even if they did find it, there not allowed to say/do anything with it.

( from personal information i can tell that it's posible by accident )

 

[devotedsniper]

I'm gonna say it's most likely killed your hard drive, there very fragile and if spinning when dropped you probably scratched the platter (the disc). If it is the hard drive, the drive is probably a lost cause (unless your willing to pay massive amounts of money for professional data recovery and even then the drive itself is dead), but the laptop should be fine if you stick a new one in.

The NVIDIA bit sounds like you probably told it to display the firmware version of the GPU (other some similar, other than the hard drive there are no moving internal parts making them very hard to break from a fall (since there all properly mounted within the protective case), so it's unlikely you killed anything else.

Just make sure everythings properly secured down and try another hard drive, or stick the laptop one into a desktop (disconnecting the other hard drives) and see what happens.