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/harddisknoise

Any 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.

Nice photo!!! ..... I would say that now , zero. (and before)

Thanks man.

Do the physical scratches/marks on the platter generally indicate the drive is hopeless?

Sorry but yes.
There could be a small chance of a partial recovery, but you have it Truecrypted and also the proportion of cost vs. recovered data is huge (ie a lot of money for very small amount of data if any). Plus, these drives are a nightmare even with no media damage.
Sorry

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+1
no chance

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Unfortunately no chance of recovery.

Seagate is being sued for this model of drive which has been proven to have such a high failure rate.
You can join the lawsuit here, maybe they will compensate customers for data loss.

https://www.hbsslaw.com/cases/seagate

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Thanks for the feedback everyone. Based on your responses I'm going to put this drive aside and not start spending money on it. Will have to suck it up.

The Seagate lawsuit that day1data linked is, at this time, only open to US residents and those who purchased their drives in the US. I emailed the law firm and got confirmation of this. They said others can fill out the form to be entered in their database and if anything changes they will be notified.

Partial recovery, chance is about 10%, price is $9k.

That would be too much for me, even if it was 100% chance of full recovery. If I win the lottery maybe I'll give it a whirl..

The drive was for personal use, not work, and I backed up my most important stuff to another drive in January this year. So it's a pain in the ass but not a major disaster.