Since the disk does not appear to be physically damaged, have you tried start-up repair options with it installed in the laptop that fell. Replace the disk in the original laptop, turn it on and press F8. Do you get the menu with the repair options? If yes, try a startup repair. You can also boot from the installation dvd and try the repair options as well as a system restore. Choose a restore point just prior to the date of the fall. System restore does affect the data. Or have you physically damaged the computer from the fall? You could put the disk into a similar hardware and boot to Windows. I would not recommend performing any changes to the hard drive until you are absolutely sure there is no other way to recover the data. Of course I have to ask, do you have backups and complete pc backups (system image) in case of catastrophic events?

I have A 320GB harddrive on which I have Windows 7 installed on my laptop. the laptop fell so windows could no longer load. I removed the hardrive and inserted it into an external case and connected it to a PC via USB. When connected to a machine running windows 7, the disk shows as Dynamic and Invalid under Disk Management. I know that if I convert to basic disk from here I will lose all my data, which is what I'm avoiding. With windows XP Pro the disk is shown as Dynamic and Foreign. I have the option to import foreign disk from the context menu of the drive. What I donot know now is whether I will get all my data after importing the foreign disk. Please help as this data is very important to me - accumulated data from years of working. Please.

thanks a lot for the quick reply but I have to say I have been able to retrieve all data from the hard drive using a third party utility- GetDataBack- and therefore can convert to basic disk without any problems. Anyway, I have tried all those options you have mentioned and couldn't make any headway before bringing it to the forum. Once again thank you.