Your best bet is to get a new hard drive. If the data is irretrievable, you could still be paying quite a bit depending how far and what kind of place you take it into. I was lucky and didn't have to pay anything for one of my dropped hard drives. The cheaper solution is to back up your data.
And tell your friends that you were told by a tech that hard drives are the worst things you can drop, they are anything except durable. I wouldn't let them touch your external if they're going to be klutzy about it. Store the hard drive in a stable place, preferably strapped somewhere as it's not even good to have a hard drive knocked around. It doesn't matter how much padding the inside of the case has, never drop a hard drive, ever! Sometimes the floor would be the ideal place to stick it, long as it won't be kicked around. Ideally having a desktop PC (and throwing in internal hard drives) are better as computer cases provide enough weight and are generally in an area where it doesn't get knocked around & why i have noticed that desktops have a longer life span then laptops/external hard drives do.
Anyway if you have tried recovery tools already chances are the drive is dead. If the hard drive is still under warranty i would just bring it back where you got it from and let them know it's not working. They might ask you if it's been dropped but as long as nothing looks broken or the case doesn't have dents/scratches on it they'll believe you that it's defective, long as you don't act nervous lol. If not there's normally a manufacture warranty, if it hasn't expired yet. If not, just get a new one and take extra care with it. Preventing a hard drive from falling isn't rocket science, even if you have to surround it with various things to keep it from falling then do that!