External HD problems

I dropped my external hard drive earlier today and when I got home from high school (not underage B& BTW), Windows recognized it as a "local drive" with the letter of F, which differs from the norm as it had the WD logo as it's icon and I had dubbed it WUGGUMS. The warranty is still valid for it, but I'd rather be able to recover my data (several years worth of image macros, hentai, and porn). I cannot access the drive through windows or DOS. It is a FAT file system, so recover will not work with it. CHKDSK, however, can read the disk. Halp me recover my data, /comp/!

According to dos, the filesystem is gone, however I have found a freeware data recovery program that is getting the job done, albeit slowly. At the very least, I have my ROMs.

P.S. Why exactly did Microsoft change windows so that it is no longer Dos dependent?