Salvaging a laptop

NEO|Phyte

I've got an Asus laptop that has suffered an impact to the keyboard area. The keys are all mashed up as a result, but aside from the 8 key, they still function. It had not been fully turned off, and when reopened, was able to load back into windows, where it seemed functional, but kept having pauses when you did anything. I rebooted to see if that would help, and found that it couldn't read the harddrive. Hopping into BIOS showed nothing on SATA 0, with the DVD drive on SATA 1.

I have not burned off a live CD to make 100% certain that the rest of the computer is functional, and am simply assuming from the fact that it was able to restore the windows session it had been in means that the important parts are functioning.

Without knowing the exact cause of it failing to detect the drive, is this something that would be easily fixable, or is it new laptop time?

Tef

Well I mean, without knowing exactly what's wrong it's hard to say. You could pop it open and check if it's as simple as some connectors coming loose or if there's any physical signs of damage

Draygo

Pull the hard drive out and put it in an external enclosure and see if you can access it via another computer. If you cant, you probably have a mechanical failure of the drive itself.

JediNight

As they said, I dunno about entirely new laptop time. But it's very possible you need to replace the HDD if Draygo's advice doesn't work. And while you're at it -- call up Asus and order a new keyboard for the thing. They should only cost around $20 and are easy to replace.

Apogee

Hard drives are very vulnerable to impact while running, and it sounds like that's what happened. Likely busted the drive - probably need a new one, although getting a new laptop would be a judgement call.

I'd consider getting a solid state drive (way faster, but less space) and filing this incident under 'unintentional upgrades'.