I have a failed ST2000VN000 SATA drive, a warranty replacement from Seagate. When it failed it took the photos from our new baby's first month of life.
(I have backups of everything else on the drive except for the most recent few weeks of photos: when I replaced the failed drive with the new one the backups got misconfigured, stored partially onto the drive that failed.)

The drive was in a Windows Home Server, hooked up to the internal SATA controller. StableBit Scanner warned of 36 uncorrectable sectors, so I powered it off.
I powered it on a week later and the BIOS did not see it. The other drives in the machine were fine.

I moved the drive to an external enclosure. I power-cycled it several times. Each time the drive powered on, it made a soft: "bzzzzzzzz-ticktick, bzzzzzzz-ticktick, bzzzzz-ticktick". Once I think it beeped. I heard no other sounds from the drive. The drive did not mount in Windows, but it did show up as connected, with its proper model number, in the list of connected USB devices.

What are my chances for data recovery?

And, any recommendations for someplace to send it? Somehow I can't quite believe the places that advertise data recovery for just a couple of hundred bucks-- but I would probably not be able to spend $1000 right now, either, and some of the places near me advertise prices starting at $1000, sigh. Could the job be made less expensive because I'd only need about 30 gigs of photos and videos, and I already know what directories they'd be in?

Thanks for any suggestions or insight!

It sounds like you are describing a stiction fault (heads stuck to platters), or a seized spindle motor.

Windows probably saw the USB-SATA bridge board inside the enclosure rather than the drive itself.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Hi, you should search for jono-ats here in this forum, he's from Atlanta..their website is:
http://www.datasaversllc.com

Regards/ Bosse

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Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

I think that you have head stickion, or media damage.

open the drive in clean cabinet Needed, to see if any chance off recovery.

Contact with a local pro!

+1, highly recommended.

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