I want to first start off saying I have little to no experience dealing with hard drives and how they function. I have a Sony VAIO laptop that I purchased almost a year ago. My one year old daughter pulled my laptop off of the table onto the floor and now it was telling me that it cannot read disk press ctrl+alt+delete to restart over and over. I did troubleshooting with Sony but because the computer wouldnt get to their recovery screen they said my data was lost. I'm in desperate need of my data as all the financial info for my company is on it (via QB, not backed up!!).

I took the hard drive out of the computer and got a 2.5 SATA External case and hooked it up to a working computer and started downloading every data recovery software that was free to try to retrieve data. Only one worked and it got....none of the files I need! What it managed to get I dont even understand! So after that I hooked it up to my dell laptop in an attempt to use Knoppix. I managed to make the Knoppix disk and get to the I guess Knoppix screen but I didnt have a clue what to do next. The working laptops hard drive showed up, the external hard drive I was going to use to transfer any recovered data to showed up, but the crashed hard drive didnt. Hooking the crashed hard drive in to the working laptop did however pull up a screen saying that my disks needed to be checked for errors. It scanned the crashed hard drive twice and started deleting and fixing stuff but the compter still didnt recognize the drive upon startup.

THEN I removed the crashed hard drive from the external case and put it back into the laptop it goes in in an effort to try to pull up Knoppix that way. It worked but I still could not see the drive. So I shut it down and restarted, managed to get to the sony recovery screen, scanned the drive and it passed all the tests saying there were no errors on the hard drive! Good news? No, because it still wouldnt start up and now I'm pretty sure that the hard drive isnt even starting up because the laptop gets stuck at the VAIO screen. Sometimes it says Boot MGR cannot be found, other times it says OS cannot be found.....but now.....it says nothing! It does nothing! Is my data lost forever?

I would say yes your data is gone. It would have been better to replace the laptop drive, saving the old one and try to format and install an OS fresh on a new drive. If the laptop acted normal, you could have used the external enclosure to see if the original drive was still good. I'm afraid that the shock of the laptop hitting the floor might have damaged the hard drive beyond repair