How to fix a cyclic Redundancy check error on a hard drive?

Hello, Hopefully someone here can help me...
I recently transferred all my photo & music files to my portable hard drive, then deleted them from my computer... today I accidently dropped the portable hard drive & now i'm having all sorts of issues trying to retrieve any files from it. When I plug it into the laptop the autorun searches through the files & appears to find them all... most of the photo files will slowly appear as thumbnails (& I do mean slowly - took half a day to get 1 folder to come up & even then some files were still loading).. when I try to open them the preview takes forever to load & often only displays half of the photo? When I try to copy the files to a second hard drive I get 2 different error messages - 1 says: 001 data error (cyclic redundancy check) & the other says: 008 cannot find the sector requested. Im completely computer illiterate so I googled the errors & was advised to install 'wisefixer' which i did, but it doesnt seem to scan the external drive, only the c: drive??? Maybe im doing something wrong??... Somebody also suggested using 'recover my files' but im not sure its what I need since my files arent exactly lost they just seem to be broken... can they be recovered or is it a hopeless endeavour? I dont want to have to take it to pc hospital unless I absolutely have to. Its doing my head in! Any suggestions would be really appreciated. cheers