I dropped my laptop and after that it won't boot Win7 anymore. I tried to reinstall Win7 several times but it keeps stopping random places with errors so I guess the disk probably took a hit. I ran some diagnostic tool and it found several bad blocks, so I'm guessing that's probably the reason. Any way to lowlevel format this disk to bring it back to a usable state?

Likely not.

If do not care about your data, which seems so as you tried to format the drive, then send it back for warranty.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Warranty is your best bet. If it is a Seagate 2.5" drive you can run SeaTools on it which should remap the bad blocks. But really, if the drive is not performing then your best bet is replacement, ideally through warranty. Any impact significant enough to cause immediate problems will certainly also put the longevity of the drive into question.

Drives are cheap, be happy you didn't have data on it that you needed and give that drive a fond farewell. It's done.

Thanks for your input. I found a tool called vivard which ran for 12 hours or so and found 5000+ bad blocks. After rebooting the laptop the bios now comes up with a "SMART failure predicted..." so I guess you're right. There was data on a secondary partition but I managed to recover that before running the vivard tool.

I think the drive is probably out of warranty, but as you said, drives are cheap these days, maybe I'll just replace it. Or maybe this will be a good excuse to convince the wife that I need a new laptop :p