Dropped T60 on floor and now get boot alert screen

[hirst60]

My T60 dropped two feet onto a carpeted wooden floor and now it has gone into an Intel boot agent mode. It can't find a device to boot from. It seems to have been damaged although I'm not sure what my next move should be. Is there a way of booting the machine through the BIOS?

[Neil]

Re-seat the hard drive and see if that makes any difference.

[hirst60]

Thanks. Will do.

Any chance this is related to the active protection system? It's supposed to come back by itself but this time it didn't.

[Neil]

More likely that the impact caused the HDD to physically come out of the socket just a little. If you find that the rubber rails are missing from the hard drive caddy, then that's almost certainly why the drive came loose.

[hirst60]

It works!

Thanks Neil -- you were spot on. I did the re-seat and it booted no problem. I think it was more likely to come loose because the side panel protecting the HDD came off with the drop. It was being held on by scotch tape since the panel had broken from a previous mishap. I really should get a screw to hold it in place.

[Neil]

Great! Glad to learn it worked, 'cause I'm usually wrong when I guess about the cause of these problems.