Hello,

I've got a Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 here which is recognized by Windows (drivers are automatically installed) and a new Drive with a Drive letter being assigned shows up. But theres no indicator next to the drive letter showing the filesystem / name of the drive or the space thats used.

Also, after turning it on, the drive makes these sounds:

http://venion.net/files/sound_a.wav

It repeats that same pattern you can hear there (multiple times in the audio-file) for approx. 20 times and then remains running but doesnt make those clicking sounds anymore.

So far, I've tried SeaTools for Windows which was able to tell me some infos about the drive, like that it has 250,06 GB total and just 1123 hours of operation behind itself (its an external drive), but the short and long tests SeaTools offered failed after half a minute each.

From all this information I would think that there is some kind of mechanical problem, since the said information could be taken from the drive by SeaTools, but further accessing it fails, while it emits sounds that sound like its repeatedly trying to find something on itself.

Can you please give me any hints on what all this could indicate and how I could proceed?

How to proceed = power off, and seek help from your local recovery agency.
Your drive has internal problems, do not power it on any more. Every second its connected to power you are at big risk to destroy data.

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Digitalsupport Data Recovery
https://digitalsupport.dk

+1 for not powering it on again

drive has at least problems to read service area information, thats why it does this clicking / seeking sounds. might be weak heads or some kind of media damage.

If data is not critical you could try to image it to a healthy drive (dd_rescue, dmde, hddsupertool) and do a logical recovery on the imaged drive. But if data is important you should not try software recovery but contact a pro for proper diagnosis.

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030 Datenrettung Berlin GmbH (Germany)
HDD, SSD, NAS, RAID Datenrettung - 030-datenrettung.de

That should be "ddrescue" and "hddsuperclone".

The OP might like to read this (caveats included):

Fixing the "Pending Bug" prior to the F3 Arch :
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=175

BTW, CrystalDiskInfo will provide a SMART report. SeaTools is not helpful in this regard.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.