laptop dropped, hard drive issue (I think)

[Norm loves Vera]

I have a Leveno G700 that I bought refurbished online at the Leveno Outlet site last Feburary.  I have upgraded the ram and overall, I am happy with it.  This weekend it dropped on it's left side edge, where the power cord plugs in and the hard drive resides.
 
The power cord is bent but works, and will be replaced obviously.  Everytime I grab or pick up the laptop by the lower left corner (I am a lefty) where the HD resides, the laptop reboots.  Well kinda, if the battery is in, I need to take it out and take out power cord for a bit then put them back and then push power.  if the battery is out, it reboots on it's own.
 
To replace the HD and the powercord on Amazon.com is @ $100.. A used refurb is @ $300 and a new one is @ $600.  I am leaning towards the $100 solution as the worse case scenario that is my fiance has the same laptop, and the Hard Drive is an upgrade to 1TB to the stock one she has now and she will have an extra power cord.
 
I don't have a disk with windows 8 or 8.1, so is it hard to install that using the old HD as a boot disk or something?  I have never done this, but can follow instructions. 
 
Am I playing with fire and being cheap?
 

 

[Couperin47]

It doesn't sound like the HD is internally damaged, what you're saying is when the case gets flexed it reboots... probably because there is damage to the hd/mb connection. You need to pull the HD and examine it's connectors, if they look solid and undamaged, then the socket it connects to is probably either damaged or some of it's soldered connections to the mb have fractured and now producing a classic intermittent  when the mb is flexed.
 
Since you have an identical laptop, swapping the HD into that machine will narrow down if it's the HD or the mb hard drive connections... btw if you chkdsk the HD are there errors ?

 

[Harry Hooper]

Suggest you make a backup image of the hard drive while it is still working. You could then restore the image to a new hard drive if that is needed down the line.

 

[Norm loves Vera]

thank you.. my hd works fine in the bride's laptop... i could not see damage on the hd anywhere.  is soldering or repairing the connections a big deal?  this is my "home office" and I really can't have it in the shop for a week.  I will call around, but locally, my experience they are hacks.

 

[Couperin47]

thank you.. my hd works fine in the bride's laptop... i could not see damage on the hd anywhere.  is soldering or repairing the connections a big deal?  this is my "home office" and I really can't have it in the shop for a week.  I will call around, but locally, my experience they are hacks.

 
This implies the damage was to the hard drive socket on the mb or fracture to it's solder connections to the mb....all this requires is complete removal of the laptop mb and either replacing that socket (a virtually impossible part to find new) or resoldering very carefully all it's connections to the mb.... the sort of thing some obsessive techie might undertake simply for the challenge of it all... in the real world you'd just replace the mb.
 
One piece of good news: list this laptop on eBay, explain exactly what has happened... you should be able to sell it for around $100 at least. Either some obsessive techie will buy it to undertake exactly what I described above or will snag it for the screen, keyboard etc since it's a perfect candidate for stripping all these valuable parts.  This should ease the financial pain of it's replacement.