What's wrong with my laptop?

It can be slower sometimes than a computer.

Your hard drive is busted. Get a new one, install your OS of choice from the CD media you have, and recreate everything you’ve lost.

If you have critical data on the old hard drive, you’ll likely need to look into professional data recovery to forensically recover your old files.

@robmandu Thanks! That’s very helpful

There is a slim chance that it just knocked the data cable out of the hard drive, but odds are that @robmandu is correct. Hard drives are pretty fragile, especially when powered up and spinning.
There is a reason most of my laptop’s hard drive is mirrored on my desktop system. If my laptop dies, I still have the data.

It sounds to me like it is trying to boot from the network. PXE (Pre-boot Excecution Environment) is what we use at work to boot from the net to image drives. Check your BIOS settings to see what boot device is first. It should be the hard drive (but that could be damaged now) Try setting it to boot from the cd and try something like UBCD and check the HD.

@BluRhino In my experience, BIOS settings rarely change themselves, and when they do it’s often to a default setting. Of course, if the hard drive is toast and the CD tray is empty, it may try the network as a last-ditch effort to find something to boot from.
BTW, how does UBCD compare with my fave, Parted Magic?

@jerv ; Thats what I was thinking, although in retrospect I see I did not make that clear. I was also thinking that since there seems to be access to another computer, the laptop drive could be removed and tested that way.

@BluRhino I generally find anything involving opening up a laptop to be a hassle best avoided. Granted, many newer laptops make drive removal/replacement easier than it used to be, but the cabling to hook up to a desktop PC…. I prefer keeping the case screwed together and trying to boot with Parted Magic for some diagnostics before I open anything up. Hell, with Parted Magic up, I can copy files or just clone entire drives!

@jerv ; Thats why UBCD was one of my most used tools – my external ide/sata drive connector was my all-time fave, never went anywhere without it. I love the hardware aspect.

@BluRhino @jerv Wow…I did not understand at all what you guys were talk about, but thanks a lot… I really wanted to believe that my hard drive was disconnected from whatever the thing is..So I let a friend of mine who knows a little bit about computers took my laptop apart and put it back together, and now it works! So I guess it was something went loose when I dropped it.

@marburgresident ; That’s great news;you dodged a bullet this time! A word of advice- Backup. Image your drive occasionally onto an external usb drive for just such an emergency. Its cheap insurance. Several free good imaging/backup programs out there for you (like Paragon) ..Your friend should be able to set you up with something.

@marburgresident Loose as in unplugged? Never mind; you probably don’t know what your friend did. Anyways, I’m glad things worked out for you, but I concur with @BluRhino that you need to start doing some sort of backups.

FWIW, any comments I directed at @BluRhino were pure geekery, so I am not surprised. Maybe we should’ve done it in private comments to avoid confusion.

@jerv @BluRhino Thanks for the advice guys, again!
@jerv Don’t worry, I knew immediately that I was not going to understand you guys, so it was not confusing at all.. and I am not going to attempt answering was is loose or unplugged..because you were right, i dont have a clue what he did