Please, help with data recovery.

[Billy Bibbi]

Hi everyone,
Yesterday morning my Seagate 320gb Freeagent Go External drive dropped from about two feet and simultaneously disconnected from its mini usb cable before hitting the wood floor. When plugged back in, the drive lights flashed and the drive made a faint beeping sound. No clicking sounds that I could hear. My computer will not recognize the drive. Several attempts were since made to plug the device in. But based on the noises it's making, it seems to be aware of its own crippled state and is preventing me from damaging it any further. I've researched around for a while and I'm now fairly confident that the issue is that the spindle motor bearing has seized. Although I have absolutely no idea what that means. See, I'm entirely incompetent when it comes to computer hardware of any kind. But I've come to the conclusion that it is a failed spindle motor because from what I read Seagates are especially susceptible to this and because the only other instance I read about of my device making this sound was due to a lack of power and had nothing to do with any sudden impact.
My question is, is there any way for me to recover this data myself? I feel that despite my own lack of experience, if given the right tools and a very detailed tutorial I think I could recover this data.
If not, I'd like to know how much you all think it would cost me to have this data professionally recovered. There was a lot of important stuff on here and I didn't back any of it up. (I know. We all have to learn some time.)

Thanks in advance for any help or advice.

 

[memory]

Is the drive recognized under disk management? If so, you could run a program called File Scavenger. It is free to scan so if it doesn't find anything, then you don't have to pay but it does cost $50 to recover the files that it found.

Can you hook it up via a usb to sata/ide adapter cable instead of the external enclosure? Recently I had a hard drive start to fail on me, it was not recognized by being hooked up internally and it was making a clicking sound. Took it out, hooked it up to a sata/ide adapter cable and it worked find and I was able to get all the files off of it.

What kind of noises does it make?

 

[Billy Bibbi]

Is the drive recognized under disk management? If so, you could run a program called File Scavenger. It is free to scan so if it doesn't find anything, then you don't have to pay but it does cost $50 to recover the files that it found.

Thanks for the advice. I will try this first suggestion through my USB port, but my only current computer is a laptop and so the second idea is not really possible for me, is it?
Although like I said, based on the research I've done on these drives, I'm fairly confident that the problem lies within the the drive itself and is unrelated to the external enclosure.

What kind of noises does it make?

Well, like I said, it's a beeping. Not continuous but repeated. Like an alarm. It's very faint. I usually have to hold the drive up to my ear to hear it. Although sometimes it gets louder. There's no clicking that I've heard. And the little LED lights on the external drive flash. When in normal working use, they only stay constantly lit.

 

[JHM]

I am not positive; but I think you have damaged it beyond the point of self repair; and doubt if you will be able to recover anything from it yourself. The bad news is I knew a lawyer here in Toronto who only had one HDD in his machine; and when that drive died he had to send it to a professional.data recovery company, which apparently dismantles HDDs in a "Clean Room" and somehow reads the data off the platters. COST to him : $2200.00. You might therefore be looking at starting over with everything. That is why I prefer numerous smaller HDDs to one gigantic one. If it dies you are screwed.

 

[JHM]

If, as he suggested, the shaft in the drive is ruined so it will no longer spin, will that work ? I ask because I have an IDE drive that lived in a Vantec IDE EZ Swap tray, - and got wrecked by inadvertantly sticking the IDE Swap cartridge into a Vantec SATA EZ Swap tray bay; - can "Data Recovery Pro" recover data from that one ?