Windows 7 - How to recover failed USB Hard Drive? Seagate Free Agent stopped....

This is a first for me, friends.
I have a lovely Seagate Free Agent USB-attached backup drive, which worked fine until it was out of warranty but now fails powerup.
What a dilemma since there is no other way to talk to it....

anyone have a suggestion as to what I can do to either find/fix the problem, or get the data off?

I used Recuva to retrieve a few thousand images with an almost 100% success rate.

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download

You could bust it-out of the enclosure and direct-connect it, whether SATA or IDE. You didn't say what model but here's one link I saved for one of my own FreeAgents for taking the thing apart. If you search you'll find alot more:

How to disassemble a Seagate FreeAgent Pro | Blog of Travis Hydzik

that's what I was aiming for... disassembly. To my utter surprise, I went on seagate's site and punched in my numbers and its still under warranty... must be 5 years instead of 1. so they'll replace it, but now I got a diff issue: when I migrated my main daily driver to a smaller hdd I put a bunch of my core sensitive files on that free agent... like login credentials and security data and financial stuff and... oh my.
I was wondering if I could make a DIY electromagnet to pass over that unit and garble the bits....
but I'll check that link. if it comes apart without breaking anything, I'll do it.

You could use CCleaner - Download to wipe the drive (Download the free version)

if I could use ccleaner on it, why would I need to?
no power
no spin
no clean

Whoops I understood a different drive

Then hit it with the biggest hammer you can find I know can't do that either

On a serious note it was possible to carefully open most external drives I have owned, as already mentioned by maxseven, then you can wipe the drive and replace it before returning to be RMA'd

Depends on the unit (how hard it is to disassemble) though I'm not sure Seagate will care anyway i.e. I don't see a "warranty void if seal is broken" sticker on any of my 3 drives. But if it were mine I'd try to save it myself first, though I do have some tools you may not e.g. a USB-to-IDE/SATA adapter for one.

So what does "fails powerup" mean anyway? Any chance your problem is either the cable or the power supply? Tried it on another PC?