So I have a Western Digital external hard drive that has served me quite well. So well, that I have entrusted it with all my movies and a lot of important backups. Recently, the harddrive fell about a foot and a half. Now, the drive appears on both my computer and a friend's that I tested it on; however, neither computer recognizes it as the drive that it once was. I'm instead asked if I want to format the drive.

Is there *any way* that I can recover the data on it?!

Can you run chkdsk on it?

go on the intertubes and find a program called "ontrack easyrecovery" run that and if there is anything that can be saved it will get it.