Death of my Hard Disk

Well, actually this is an old news. I just wasn't able to post it for I need to recover from its depressing effect.
Three weeks ago I bought a new portable hard drive 320GB in capacity. It was a cheap one, with a not so tough casing and set my mind they are all just the same. Because I need to save money for a more important needs, I went for that one. I then transferred my files, cutting from my old dying HD to save the files. I then formatted the old one but that was a big mistake.
To cut the story short, I accidentally dropped my new HD for just a couple of feet or less. It was devastating. I lost my files. The HD is physically damaged and I can't recover from my old one.
Luckily, I was able to reconstruct part of my 3D libraries from my friends but what I lost are my collection of family pictures and personal work files, including the 2 books that I'm working on. The pictures I hope there's a copy back home but the books that I'm working on, there's no other copy but the one I lost.
It was double saddening situation. I lost the files and I lost the whole price of the disk because I can't return it to the shop since dropping it was not covered by the warranty. I'll just charge what happened to experience and learn the lesson from it. Making a mistake once is accident, committing the same mistake all over again is foolishness.