Could it be a hard drive issue?

Hey everyone.
My laptop took a little bump a few days ago, but honestly, everything seemed totally fine right after. Then, about two or three days later, the whole thing just froze up on me—I actually had to force it off. Since then, it’s been getting slower by the hour, and now I can’t even get into macOS. It sits on the startup screen for like ten minutes, hits me with a quick Blue Screen of Death, and then just restarts. It offers a repair option, but that takes forever and doesn't actually fix anything. Is my hardware slowly dying on me, or could it be something else? It's weird that I'm not even getting a "beep" code from it. I thought about just wiping the OS in case I caught some nasty virus, but what are the odds of hitting something that 🤔 heavy? I really want to be sure before I go lugging this thing down to the Apple Store.

It’s possible that dropping the laptop might have damaged the hard drive—those components can be pretty sensitive to a sudden impact. If I were in your shoes, I’d try a fresh installation of macOS. If you notice the installation process is dragging or taking an unusually long time, then there's a good chance the hard drive is toast and you'll need to grab a replacement.

I’d suggest grabbing a Hiren's Boot CD and running a full diagnostic on the hard drive, or maybe just run it through an HDD Regenerator from a disc instead...

Try running chkdsk c: /f in your command prompt, then just give Windows a quick restart. It’ll check your file system. If you think the drive might have some bad sectors, you can always dig into that using some tools from a Microsoft boot CD.