6 flights...that's beyond most drives impact tolerance imo, even when not spinning

might even have cracked/shattered the platters :(

hope not 'cause that would suck immensely...

GENTLY shake the drive and if you hear a tinkling I'm afraid you're pretty F'ed

Almost the same happened to me. Dropped my HDD too and lost all the savegames. Could not get them back by myself but it is possible to recover them. It just costs something like 100$ or even more. :(

Aye mate I feel for you.

Not many options for you to take...if it's worth the$$$ then well you know what to do...

Sadily I'm just waiting for a few sony kidz to come in and start the war.

Now this is why I wish we could still use memory cards for saved games... More modern memory cards of course, not those huge blocks that have like 8MB of space.

We can't use usb thumb drives for saved games now?  I thought you could.  I will try later just to see.   If not that completely sucks ass.

*****EDIT*****

On topic, make sure to never open the drive if you ever want to have a chance at retrieving your saves.  If you open it you will more than likely get dirt and dust between the platters and the reader heads.  It takes experts who do this stuff and most are in very clean rooms to minimize these dust particles.   There are several places online to get this info back, but it is very pricey.  And in some cases you simply can't get everything you want off of the drives.  

Like the person above stated, make sure and gently shake the drive and if you can hear loose particles inside the hard drive its pretty much gone.  The platters will have been cracked or broken and that means no fixing.

Good luck either way, I wish you luck on it.  Even though I don't have a lot of saves, I would miss them a lot if they were taken away.  Esp... the mass effect ones. 

bringing to a mate's... that's what memory cards/USB keys were made for....

Do you have a component cable selnor?

if you do, instead of switching from HD to Tv by using that cable, just plug off the HD cable and have the SD cable in and then go back and plug the HD cable.

the xbox restarts when you switch cables.

That HDD is toast after six flights of stairs. Don't even waste your time thinking about it anymore.

Dude that sucks ... you really shouldn't put your precious so close to 6 flights of stairs!!!!!