Dropped my Macbook Air, hard-drive failure?

[Cathaoir99]

Hi,

Last night my MacBook Air fell of my coffee table, only about a 1 foot drop, when i opened the lid the screen was froze so i restarted and was greeted by the flashing folder. Couldn't initiate safe mode, so tried internet recovery and found that in disk utility my hard drive wasn't coming up. The MacBook is 2013, 128gb SSD. I thought that considering its an SSD and it was a fairly small drop, it would have been able to withstand the fall. Are the chances that I need to replace the drive? Is there a probability that simply a loose connection is causing the failure? I don't have the right screw drivers right now so need to wait until tomorrow to take it apart.

Cheers

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

There's a slight chance the SSD got jostled by the drop and is now not registering (hence the folder) but it's held in with a screw so that's unlikely. It is possible the SSD is damaged.
If you have the pentalobe and Torx, it's worth opening the Mac and reseating the drive, but if that has no effect, you need a new drive.

 

[SmOgER]

There's a slight chance the SSD got jostled by the drop and is now not registering (hence the folder) but it's held in with a screw so that's unlikely. It is possible the SSD is damaged.
If you have the pentalobe and Torx, it's worth opening the Mac and reseating the drive, but if that has no effect, you need a new drive.

And you made that conclusion based on what??
There are number of things on the motherboard that could go wrong which could cause that boot error. It's very unlikely that SSD got damaged. It doesn't have any moving parts and is just as durable to drops as let's say RAM memory chips. You can be dropping it all day long and as long as it's in some kind of enclosure (in this case - laptop chassis) it will be fine. You can't just shake soldered parts off.

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

I said "slight chance" not "conclusion". Are you saying the SSD is soldered? (It's not.)
Can you please let us know the other motherboard errors that cause the flashing folder?

 

[SmOgER]

I said "slight chance" not "conclusion". Are you saying the SSD is soldered? (It's not.)
Can you please let us know the other motherboard errors that cause the flashing folder?

I'am quoting: "opening the Mac and reseating the drive, but if that has no effect, you need a new drive." This is by definition your conclusion that SSD is to blame, not "slight chance".

No, I'am not saying SSD is soldered to the mobo (lol).

Components on SSD are soldered. Chances of it failing from vibrations/shock of a relatively small drop when it wasn't directly hit with anything are extremely small. In fact, they are not much bigger than it failing out of the blue with no dropping whatsoever.

many things could fail, including but not limited to integrated PCI-e storage controller and PCI-E slot. Maybe motherboard wasn't properly secured in place and something snapped during impact. In either case, resetting PRAM / SMC, then taking bottom cover off for a quick look would be a start.

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

What is the quick look going to accomplish?

 

[SmOgER]

Are you serious?
If something snapped, it should be fairly obvious. Also, making sure that SSD is secured (missing or loose screw?) and PCI-E slot is firmly in place.

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

Are you serious?
If something snapped, it should be fairly obvious. Also, making sure that SSD is secured (missing or loose screw?) and PCI-E slot is firmly in place.

Oh ok cool, sounds like exactly what I first suggested.

 

[SmOgER]

...Except that you falsely concluded that SSD is automatically faulty if reseating doesn't help...

 

[akimoriRyuuji]

How about take it to the shop and get an inspection done?
Instead of, you know, making it 999x worse by opening it and attempting to perform repairs on it yourself.

Also, take it to a qualified Apple repair shop.