repeating BSODs and bad memory?

i've had my t61p for 2 years now, and now something's being weird.

last night in the car, my backpack (with laptop) fell from the chair to the floor. not at all a serious drop, and in a padded backpack, it was barely anything.

this morning, it wouldn't recognize any power. battery power, ac power, nothing. eventually i let it sit without battery and it then started up - or tried to.

i kept getting BSODs for different reasons - rdbss.sys, ntfs.sys, RDR_FILE_SYSTEM, MEMORY_MANAGEMENT...

one time during boot up, it ran chkdsk and i remember seeing it delete some corrupt file.

after this, i could get to my desktop, but the system font was no longer segoe ui, my taskbar shortcuts were empty, blank icons, all my programs seemed like they were running for the first time (firefox bookmarks gone, internet explorer now is default browser).
i rebooted a second time, and my desktop wallpaper changed to a black screen, and my taskbar shortcuts reverted to the windows defaults (IE, windows media player i think).

i ran the windows memory diagnostics and immediately it said that hardware is bad, before progress changed to even 1%.

could it just be bad RAM? it doesn't seem that way to me because i don't see why my computer would behave the way it has been. also the ntfs.sys BSOD hints to me that it's more related to my hdd.

anyone have any thoughts?

 

Something probably isn't seated properly or the drive is now damaged.

I would pull the main battery and hard drive for starters. I would then reseat the SoDIMM memory sticks.

I would pop the hard drive and battery back in.

Pray to your divine entity of choice and hit the power button.

Good luck!

 

usually the hdd is the first to go in a drop... so i would think you should run some intensive hdd tests using an external hdd caddy.

 

The hard drive caddies for Thinkpad T-series, at least after Lenovo bought the brand, are designed such that the hard drive is not directly mounted at all to the chassis of the laptop. It has rubber bumpers, but the HDD, mounted to the caddy with the rubber bumpers over it simply slides in the HDD slot. It could very well be that it was just dislodged enough to have a bad connection. I would first reseat the HDD, and the RAM. Then do a HDD diagnostic test, one that scans the entire surface of the drive and specific to the drive manufacturer, and then run memtest86+ (make sure you run the + version, the plain memtest86 doesn't seem to be maintained anymore). Though scratch that--change the order around, first run memtest86+, then the HDD diagnostic second.