Hello all. This is my first post to the forum. I am a veteran computer user but not an expert at all on hard drives.
I have a Seagate ST3000DM001 Barracuda 3 TB hard drive that has failed on me. 2 partitions on the drive failed 2 days ago. They were both bootable drives, one Ubuntu, the others Windows 10, each about 100 Gb in size. The other 2 partitions are both data partitions fully encrypted with Truecrypt, about 1.2 GB each. I was able to mount both the Truecrypt volumes yesterday using a SATA-USB adapter on another computer running Ubuntu. I was only able to see one of the OS partitions in the Disk utility on ubuntu but could not mount it. Foolishly I did not back up any of my data from the data partitions yesterday because I thought the bad thing that had happened was over. Even more foolish I left the drive powered up last night. When I got up this morning it was making a buzzing noise and I was not able to access any data on it. I rebooted the drive and it showed up as a 4 GB unformatted drive in the Disk Utility in Ubuntu. I turned off power to it.
I opened up the drive and had a look inside. There were circular scratch like marks towards the inside of the top platter. I am assuming these are the problem. I am attaching a picture. Can anyone offer an opinion on the likelihood of recovering any significant amount of data from this drive? The scratch marks appear to fairly light.
I don't know what caused the scatches. I did not drop the drive or anything. The only thing I can think of that might have caused the problem is that the weather here (southern Ontario) had been fairly hot the past few days and my A/C hasn't been working? Maybe the drive overheated?
When I power the drive up now it makes a noise as if it is spinning up, then makes a couple of beeps and begins to spin down. I am attaching a link to a Soundcloud file of this noise. The click at the beginning is me turning on power to the drive; the click at the end is me turning off power.
https://soundcloud.com/leo999-1/harddisknoiseAny assistance would be greatly appreciated. I am just wondering what the chances might be of a professional being able to recover data from the drive, or if there might be anything I could try myself to recover the data.