yes, very much aware of the age old debate:-)
My point is that you may *not* loose the whole drive. I had the "wonderful" experience of having a 20GB harddrive loose all of its data in one deep pothole bump when it was laying flat and very coushined back in 2001. The drive survived though, but I had to reformat the drive since the paration table and data on it was f-ed.
i learned to mount it on its side back then:
laptop harddrives are a completely different story; they are made to take some medium abuse.