Dropped laptop- restore via external drive?

[IllWills]

Hello so I have what may or may not be an interesting situation. I dropped my wife's laptop the other day and on starting it up it went to the startup repair prompt (before "starting windows") however whether I select to go through the startup repair or try to start windows, the result us the same: I get back to the prompt. I have gone through the whole F8 list of starup options, none of which got me anywhere. It's an HP 625 and has some diagnostics so I ran them and it came up with a hard drive error. So my question is: is the hard drive just completely dead? Or would I be able to perform any semblance of a recovery if I were to put it in an external enclosure?

HP 625 Notebook
Seagate momentus 5400.6 320GB hard drive.
This is actually the exact model: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834157545

 

[Traildriver]

It depends...was it on at the time? Perhaps only a cable to the drive came loose.

If it was on then the drive might be toast. But do get it out of the machine and try hooking it to a desktop temporarily to see if the drive is readable.

 

[IllWills]

It was on and I already opened the bottom up and pulled out the hard drive and put it back in to no avail. So my question is, say I plug it into another computer and it's readable, would there be any way to do all the things a system recovery would do while it's being used as an external drive?

 

[IllWills]

So I've actually got the hard drive out and hooked up as an external drive, is there anything I can do to recover/restore the main partition? Making it bootable again would be nice but really as long as I can access it long enough to get it off I should be ok.