Storage forum: Cannot initialize WD Passport after possibly dropping it

Afternoon all,

I've been trawling forums for a while now and not really found a solid answer. I think I dropped my WD Passport, it was about a week ago and I was running around at work, and since then I can't get the drive to be recognised fully.

Setup
ACER 6950 Laptop - Vista HP SP1

Symptoms
Under disk management, Vista can find a drive it calls Drive 1, Unknown, at first when I tried to reinitialize it said cannot find the sector requested, now I just get improper function error
Not very scientific but I get the bing bong tones when it's plugged in and there is a drive to "safely remove".
It sometimes appears under disks in device manager and a USB mass storage device under USB
I can also change the drive from performance to quick remove in the device properties

Solutions I've tried
Lying it on various sides, apparently that was a fix elsewhere
Different USB cables, though no new ones but the symptons are the same and I can't believe that 3 cables would all have the same problem

Any help or forum pointer would be amazing. I'm currently volunteering in Tanzania with no local expertises, slow internet connection and limited funds, but I need to get some important research papers off the drive and am considering paying for data recovery.

Lesson learned not to leave important docs on drives.

Cheers in anticipation.
Trying all of the above on XP desktops