Hmmm...That's Not A Noise It Usually Makes, Is It ?

So, I was attaching a new monitor to our PC at home(Flat screen-Thank you, Special Lady's Dad), and I guess I jostled the computer a bit, and our external hard drive fell to the floor.Our external hard drive that has our ITunes on it. Our ITunes with nearly 450GB of music on it. It immediately started making a sound akin to a chalkboard being fed into a meat grinder. I stared at it as it lay there, grinding away, and I was thinking..."Oh, that isn't good."
  I slowly and gently picked it up and placed it back where it normally stood, atop the PC.I hoped that returning to its' home might make it feel a little better. Alas, I was wrong. It made a little more grinding noise, and then, the grinding stopped.
  Ever the optimist, I thought that perhaps now that it was upright again, and the grinding had stopped, then it was fine, and all would okay.
  I clicked on My Computer...the external hard drive did not appear. I remembered that a few other times, it had disappeared from the computer, and removing the USB cord and re-attaching it had worked. I did that. It also didn't work. I tried leaving it turned off...Didn't work either.
  My Special Lady and I decided to take it in for a diagnosis the next morning. I decided to leave it plugged in and connected overnight, just in case it needed 9 or 10 hours to warm up after it catastrophic tumble.
  It was still inert the next morning. I could make it grind melodically by unplugging it and plugging it back in, but that was not the use we had planned for it.
  We entered the computer store, and they quickly told us that once it makes that grinding noise, there is nothing they can do for it.He suggested that I could go to as company that could try and salvage the data, but that starts at several hundred dollars. He also showed me this neat IPhone app that showed me how the hard drive worked.How fucking neat!!
        I stopped short of telling him to shove his IPhone up his ass and we left.I just lost all of my digital music, I don't want to see a cool IPhone app, you cockknocker!!
  Okay, that was harsh, and unfair. And it was a pretty cool app, but still.
  So,atht was that. I do ahve a backup from a few months ago, so we'll see how much we're still missing after I reload that, and we bought a new 1TB external hard drive last night. True, it did immediately cause our computer to crash...But that's because the Install Wizard could not find the driver. I have found their website, and I can download the drivers from them, and hopefully that will fix that problem. then I'll probably start hitting you guys up to start lending me some cee dess !! :)