Windows XP stuck during booting on the splash screen

Question

Yesterday I accidentally dropped my school's Dell computer onto to floor. It didn't appear to be damaged so I turned the computer on to see if it still worked. To my brief moment of relief, the laptop still appeared to work as it reached Windows XP's splash screen.

After about five minutes of it remaining on the splash screen, I restarted the computer and the same problem still occurred. It was fine before I dropped it, so I don't think any malware affected my computer.

Does anyone have any suggestions how I might be able to fix my computer?

Answer 1

Sounds to me like you may have damaged some sectors of your harddrive. Try booting in safemode, if that fails try booting off of a linux live disk to see if you can access your files.

If you can make a backup of the files.

Then I would boot into windows recovery console and run check disk will all options. This will take a long time, but will tell you and sometimes fix whats wrong.

If all that fails, get a new harddrive and reinstall. I wouldnt trust a broked HDD