I've never dropped or otherwise physically damaged a drive, but I did have one begin to fail. This was one of my first HD's, a whopping 212 megs, back in the good ol' DOS days. Suddenly the drive locked up. Doing a scandisk I found it locked up at one specific cluster. I already had newer larger drives so I just methodically started copying directory by directory. I ended up being able to copy all but one obscure file in a game, which would have had to be reinstalled anyway.

That you can read the directory may or may not be a good thing. The directory table is stored in a specific physical location on the disk. But the directory only points to where to find the start of the data. Other parts of the disk may be damaged and until you actually try to access them you won't know if you can recover.

Brian