Laptop HDD issues

Hey there,

I'm dealing with a Dell Latitude 5000 series—basically, I dropped my laptop by accident. Everything seemed fine at first, but then a few days later, during the Windows 10 boot sequence, I got hit with this message: "Repairing disk errors. This might take over an hour to complete". I tried running a Windows reinstall via a USB drive, but it won't even boot from the USB.
Anyone have a clue what's going on here? Is it possible the HDD finally bit the dust?

...so when he told you to wait until that specific time passed... did everything seem fine once it finally wrapped up?

just please don't tell me you turned it off 😢 .... or that you can't remember the report it spits out at the end.

To boot from a USB, you've gotta tweak the "boot order" so that the bootable USB is set as priority one and the hard drive is second... check your laptop's manual to see which F key you need to tap during startup to get into those settings, or just dive straight into the BIOS.
The impact probably caused some bad sectors on the hard drive, so if you can't get things working by booting Windows 10 from a thumb drive and using its repair tools, you should run some diagnostic software to check.

If the hard drive is pretty much toast, pull it out and plug it into a desktop PC. If the system recognizes it, grab all your personal stuff—documents, photos, videos, music, emails, browser bookmarks, whatever—then just swap in a fresh hard drive for the laptop.

wearymason4 said:...so when he told you to wait until that specific time passed... did everything seem fine once it finally wrapped up?

just please don't tell me you turned it off 😢 .... or that you can't remember the report it spits out at the end.

To boot from a USB, you've gotta tweak the "boot order" so that the bootable USB is set as priority one and the hard drive is second... check your laptop's manual to see which F key you need to tap during startup to get into those settings, or just dive straight into the BIOS.
The impact probably caused some bad sectors on the hard drive, so if you can't get things working by booting Windows 10 from a thumb drive and using its repair tools, you should run some diagnostic software to check.

If the hard drive is pretty much toast, pull it out and plug it into a desktop PC. If the system recognizes it, grab all your personal stuff—documents, photos, videos, music, emails, browser bookmarks, whatever—then just swap in a fresh hard drive for the laptop.

I let it run for almost a day and a half and nothing changed. I'm reading on foreign forums that you can leave it running forever, but it won't actually fix anything.

I'm wondering if I can swap an SSD into this laptop instead of the current HDD—I saw online that I can use an adapter to put an SSD in place of the optical drive LINK And would I be able to set that SSD up to run Windows after the installation?

Sure you can, but I’m more interested in how you handled those specific steps—when you went to reinstall macOS, did you remember to adjust the boot order so the USB takes priority? And was the drive actually bootable (did you use a tool like Rufus or something similar to flash the installer onto the USB)? Also, did you catch any bad sectors once you ran scans with utilities like CrystalDiskInfo or HD Tune?