Damaged External Hard Drive

I'm having a lot of problems with my external hard drive and I can't seem to find a solution... my sister tripped over my hard drive cord and it fell on the floor. This was not the first time she did that... after this last time though anytime I tried to load it, it said something like "Disk must be formatted before use." I looked up a bunch of forums on what I could do and what the problem was, and everyone said that it was probably damaged and I'd need to try and recover the files. I tried using a free file recovery program (Recuva) because right now I'm jobless and living at my dad's place... so I couldn't get anything better. I did a few scans and got some of my stuff back, but I wasn't quite finished when it randomly started giving me another problem.

Now it only shows up in "My Computer" half the time, and instead of saying what it used to say when it loads it says "F:\ is not accessible. The parameter is incorrect." I don't know what that means and I can't seem to get any of the file recovery programs to work anymore. Every time I try to use one of them they just say "Cyclic redundancy check - data error" and then close... but they used to work. I don't understand why it's suddenly doing this now or what I can do about it. Someone please help...

 

If the drive was running when it fell on the floor, it could very well have damaged one of the read/write heads inside the drive or damaged the disk that the data is stored on which in turn may have damaged a head. If a head is damaged, the only recovery method for that side of that disk is to place it in a different drive and try to avoid the damaged area of the disk. This is not easily done. Companies such as OnTrack do this for a living and are very good at it however they also charge a lot for their services.

A hard drive is a much more fragile piece of hardware then most people realize. Moving a HDD at all while it's on can jeopardize your data. The platters or disks inside act like a gyroscope. When you move the drive it can put stress on the heads and do damage to the disk and the head.

 

Yes it was running when it fell, my sister wasn't watching where she was walking and tripped over the power cord twice. The first time it didn't seem to have any problems afterwords but this time... it pretty much died. At the very least I have managed to get my documents and most of my pictures back, which were the most important to me. However whenever I try to find my music or videos it can't find anything. When I do a search for all files, it again does not find any of my music or videos. Is this probably because that part of the disk is permanently damaged? If this is the case, would there even be any point in sending it to a professional like OnTrack? I only need the music and videos at this point and I don't want to give it to them just to have them tell me they couldn't get anything and then still have to pay them...

Also, I'm considering purchasing a new external hard drive that doesn't need a power cord to prevent this from happening again, such as a Seagate passport or something. Are those types of hard drives reliable? I really don't know anything about their differences.