First, back up anything important. As you’re getting bad clusters that most likely means the drive was physically damaged when it was dropped – the more you use it, the more damage is caused.

Second, get a replacement drive – as it’s a Vista PC that’ll mean a 2 1/2” SATA drive.

They’re easy to replace. If you look underneath the laptop there are a number of covered slots for things that people usually want to replace or upgrade (hard drive, battery, RAM, etc) The hard drive will slide in from one side. You’ll need a small screwdriver.

Use the recovery CD, restore your backed up files.

An alternative approach, or additional step, would be to get an external caddy to hold your old drive, so if it’s still working you could copy anything off it you missed earlier.