I took a pretty nasty fall the other day and took my laptop with me. I didn't think anything of it at first, but when I got back upstairs, I got the dreaded "Operating System not found..." message. I ran a couple of tests, BIOS wasn't finding the drive, so I went out and bought a replacement (something similar had happened before, and I assumed I had just damaged the disk--luckily I was able to save the data this time). But when I got back and attempted to install Windows 7 on it, I noticed that while I was able to access the drive, it would go through what appeared to be very large spells of unresponsiveness. Basically, for 15% of the time, everything works fine and Windows would try to install. But for the rest of the time, the hard drive just does nothing. The activity light will glow solid for a few minutes at a time, then die off, then become solid again. Occasionally it will resume normal activity (I was able to get Windows to unpack about 80% of the copied data once), but because it stays inactive for long, I've had no success installing Windows, and sometimes the PC will start up and not recognize the drive. I tore the laptop to the ground last night attempting to locate a dislodged cable or something, but I can't seem to find anything wrong. I'm assuming there's a problem with the controller, and based on the configuration of the laptop (an HP dv6780se), that probably means the motherboard needs to be replaced.

Confirmy/Deny/You'redumbdothis?

Thanks for any help.