OK smart folks -

Every computer I plug it into acts like it recognizes it, makes the loud pinging sound, the lED on the drive itself activates for a second... then... NOTHING.

Is the drive toast?  Can the data be recovered economically?

those drives are the devi..     we have been having alot of problems with those drives.  not just seagate but all of them.  

check one of your local computer repair shops, they can help you out.

Did it make the loud pinging sound when it worked? Loud noises from failed disk drives aren't generally recoverable, economically.

Quoted: Did it make the loud pinging sound when it worked? Loud noises from failed disk drives aren't generally recoverable, economically.

By "ping" I mean the default "tung ding" sound windows XP makes when it recognizes a USB device.

The tech at Circuit City pretty much told me I was fucked.  The tech at Seagate data recovery told me it would cost a minimum of $900 to recover the data.

I guess I'm fucked.  Fortunately, much of it is on my internal hard drive - the pocket drive was used as backup.  The main things lost are pictures and some more sensitve personal files I did not want easily accessible on my computer (it was accessible by anyone in the area).

Two things...

Have you tried it on another computer?

and if you have, sometimes you can take apart those drives and try hooking it up to your pc internally with a 80pin IDE cable adapter to a laptop ide connection.

-d

Quoted: Two things... Have you tried it on another computer? and if you have, sometimes you can take apart those drives and try hooking it up to your pc internally with a 80pin IDE cable adapter to a laptop ide connection. -d

Not sure it's even a laptop HD interface.. That bugger is SMALL.  

ETA- if the problem is in the case/controller and not the drive itself, it's possible one might buy a duplicate, disassemble the thing and swap the old drive into the new case and have some luck that way.  Lord knows though, that thing aint Hoyle.