the ground first, it can be cracked or completely broken off its hinges. If that
happens, you’re not going to find a solution in this book; you’re going to need
to take or send it to a repair facility — and you’ll have to decide if the cost of
repair exceeds the value of the machine.
But you should be able to retrieve the information that is stored on the hard
drive. The first thing to do is hook up the laptop to an external monitor or
television and enable output to that screen. (Consult the instruction manual
for your laptop to learn the keystroke combination or switch.) If you see an
image on the monitor or screen, your motherboard, hard drive, and keyboard
are not damaged. See Chapter 12 for more details.
Don’t panic if you don’t see an image: Consider whether now is the time to
offload any essential data, pictures, and music to another computer. You can
use the CD-R or DVD-R to burn a disc to hold a great deal of data, or you can
connect the machine to an Ethernet by cable or WiFi and grab the data in
that way. Another alternative is to use the WiFi system or a dial-up modem
and send the files to your own e-mail account.
If you are unable to communicate with your laptop, another way to get the
data off the hard drive is to remove it from the machine and install it in a
working laptop or in an external enclosure and attach it to a desktop or
laptop to offload the data. See Chapter 7 for full details on this process.
Finally, there’s this: Was the hard drive writing data when it fell? Although
the tiny hard drives used in modern laptops are pretty sturdy devices, one
of the worst-case scenarios is for the laptop to tumble at the exact fraction of
a second when the read/write heads are recording information to the drive.
If the jolt is hard enough, one of two things can happen: First, the data can
be corrupted, with the head bouncing around instead of hovering over its
assigned location. Or, the jolt could be hard enough to cause the read/write
head to make contact with the surface of the disk. Though the head is
extremely light, the disk’s high speed can make the collision seem like a
Hollywood remake of “The Day the Earth Caught Fire.” (Great movie, by the
way.. .an overlooked sci-fi classic.)
A corrupted hard drive can sometimes be partially or fully repaired using basic
tools like those included in Norton SystemWorks or in System Mechanic. (See
Chapter 19 for details.) Or you may have to remove the hard drive from the
laptop and ship it to a professional data recovery company; these guys are
capable of stripping information off a drive and rerecording it on a new drive
or onto a CD or DVD.
Part VI: The Part of Tens ...........................................
