Dropped my laptop

Well my laptop's power cable became entangled in the wheels of my daughter's pushchair without my noticing, and when I tried to move her I found my beloved hardware suddenly trying to blend in with the carpet. The power immediately went off, which I assume is a safety device. When I rebooted I didn't notice any problems, but I'd like advice on how to be sure. I tried fscking it but it warned me about fscking a mounted filesystem. Can I remount the root filesystem readonly, or should I just boot into Knoppix and do it from there?

The component that's most likely to have been damaged, if everything else checks out, is the hard drive (and possibly the CD/DVD drive if you had a disc in there at the time). Boot with Knoppix and do a full check from there; it's the safest option.

Oddly, I've noticed shocks can fuck up batteries too - years ago I dropped my clunky 386 Compaq, within hours the battery had started playing up, and within a couple of days it wouldn't hold a charge any more. Perhaps it shorted when it was dropped, or perhaps it ruptured one of the cells (this was in the days of NiCad, of course)? Same thing happens with my MP3 player - if you jar it, the battery meter drops (though it seems to be fine after recharging). Weird, no?

No matter how the HD checks out, I wouldn't trust it too much. If some particles have flaked off inside it could be a while until the errors pop up, but pop up they will.

On the plus side, laptop HD are both small and designed for some amount of jarring. You might get lucky.

BTW, I recommend using SpinRite on the drive.

>>3
Doesn't SpinRite cost money?

You need to remount read-only in order to do a proper fsck. With some luck this can be done with `mount -o remount,ro /´ if not reboot and tell grub or lilo `init=/bin/sh´.

If you want to be really sure, get the disk manufacturer's utility and run the long test from inside it (you may need a DOS boot disk for this; FreeDOS will work fine). You can also use the "smartmontools" package from inside Linux to do self-tests on newer IDE drives.

The bootable CD at www.ultimatebootcd.com already has the diagnostic utilities for most major HD manufacturers in one place (plus lots of other handy tools).