I have a very old laptop that I wanted to get going again and the hard drive fell on the floor from about 1.5m high. The laptop is still running but the load is always at 100%, I can't say whether that was the case before the fall. What can I do to calm this down 100% or how can I see if it is broken now. (Preferably without tools)
The fastest way is with a program like Crystal Disk Info.
Otherwise, if he does nothing, there should also be no utilization.
That the HDD is running at 100% is not worrying, that is normal with HDDs. It would only be worse if the so-called head crash would occur, but then the hard drive would no longer work.
Depending on how long the device has not been in operation, this can be normal, even if the laptop is apparently idle, updates are still downloaded, installed and other tasks performed in the background.
If it is still running, you have been pretty lucky, with a hard drive (HDD) such a fall can mean death, but I would still be prepared for the fact that it might have suffered a certain amount of damage and might say goodbye at some point.
To counteract the load, you could let it run for a while (one night or 1-2 days) and then defragment the hard drive if necessary. Alternatively, I would rather recommend an SSD and replace the hard drive.
Why without tools, nobody is clairvoyant. Download the freeware HD Tune onto your laptop and run a detailed error scan. Otherwise, pretty much all hard drive manufacturers offer their own free programs for such tests.
You can almost certainly assume that it is broken. If there's important data on it, be sure to leave it switched off and send it to professionals. Each read access damages the disk even more until it is irreparable.
The program says "overall condition: GOOD"
why is that 100%
This is not uncommon with HDDs, especially when it comes to the small, slow laptop HDDs. As long as the program does not find any direct errors, you can trust them for the time being. With such older devices, Windows updates often take hours, not infrequently even half a day. But you can also simply check which processes are using your hard drive in the task manager.
