Seagate Barracuda 3GB no longer being properly recognised, and beeping

I have a Seagate External HDD, srd00f2, that until yesterday was working perfectly. I can not think of anything that has changed, other than that the drive is no longer being recognised by Windows, and is beeping when connected. I have already tried a number of things, and have the following results:

Connecting 'normally' through USB. My laptop's USBs have been playing up a little recently, but I have tried the drive with two separate cables, on two separate laptops.

Windows Disk Management shows:
Unknown
3.86 GB
Not Initialised
and to the right, one partition of 3.86GB, Unallocated.

Hard Disk Sentinal shows the serial number and 3.9GB, but no other information and a lot of '?'s

Minitool Partition Wizard shows
Disk 2
MBR
3.86 GB
Read Only (in red)

and then next to it, 3.9 GB, Bad Disk

HD Tune Pro allows me to do an error scan, but gives 100% bad sectors. If I do any other tests, I get I/O error, test aborted.

Safely Remove Hardware shows Eject Expansion Disk

DISKPART shows the drive as online, 3950MB total size, 3950MB free. I tried attr disk clear readonly but got the error that Diskpart failed to clear the attribute.


Connecting as a SATA drive.

I removed the drive from its case. Inside is a Barracuda 3TB drive, model st3000dm001. I have connected it using a SATA to USB 2.0 adaptor, and the results are even worse.

In Windows Disk Management, it shows Disk 1 as Unknown, Not Initialised. Trying to initialise the disk as GPT gives the error that the disk is too small, and the device indicates as 'Not Ready' if done as MBR.

HD Tune Pro reacts exactly the same as when connected by USB

Minitool Partition Wizard shows the disk as:
Disk 2
MBR
0.00 GB
and there is no way of interacting with the disk.

Hard Disk Sentinal is, again, just showing ???

The option in Safely Remove Hardware is: Eject USB to ATA/ATAPI Bridge

The disk beeps as it is connected. as I plug it in, the disk spins up and then gives me:
1 beep
0.5 second pause
1 beep
1.0 second pause
1 beep

I have tried everything I can think of, and everything Google can think of on my behalf. The data on the drive is, naturally, quite important so I'm looking to save the data rather than the drive.

Thanks in advance for your help and suggestions!

Jenks

And as a picture paints a thousand words - this is connected through USB

Thank you, both, for your time. It appears the drive must go to the data-storage rubbish dump in the sky...

Failing which you may even get more adventurous :).

jumanji said:

Failing which you may even get more adventurous :).

very informative. Thanks for posting.

So, I tried a little percussion engineering, with no discernible change. I then opened the drive up, but the heads were already parked (pic to follow). I put it back to gether, nd turned it on. It didn't explode, but it also didn't work. Here's a video of the beeps as I power it up, as it doesn't sound the same as the other videos with stuck heads...

The insides!