Explain some more the sounds you hear from the drive and when they occur in the drive operations.

When it was dropped were you just playing files or were things being moved around or copied/deleted. (keep in mind if you are using progrms like iTunes then the answer is yes, as every time a file is played it is re-saved with thier play statistics) If this is yes, then the catalog file for the drive maybe corrupt. In the past, used programs like DiskWarrior (mac) to deal with these types of issues.

Another option is to get an identical drive and as long as the platters are not scratched, you can swap them. (there's plenty of technical details involved in this...)

Does your laptop recognize that the drive is connected?

If it does you may have the ability to run the unix utility dd, which will make an exact copy of the drive. Takes a long time but does the work. Then you can work in a protected environment to recover the main catalog file.

And you will find more technically minded folks in the How-To's Technical forums.