By the sound of it your friends drive has probably been knocked out of calibration by the physical impact. If it doesn't have major damage to the platter surfaces, a recovery utility may well be able to restore the data, eventually.

GetDataBack works amazingly well, but on a drive with lots of errors is SLOW. I ran it on a drive from a friend a few months ago, a very old Maxtor 40GB IDE one, which was full of bad sectors, and it took it three and a half days to simply map the bad bits. Then another 4 days to retrieve everything it could.

It probably cost more in electricity to do the work than the drive was worth But seeing as it was the only copy of a charities entire financial records and other documentation, it was worth the effort. It got pretty much everything back.

Why is it that the people with the most important data never seem to have even heard of the idea of backups...

pca