Seagate external hard drive not detected and beeped

I have a Seagate FreeAgent Go 320gb external hard drive. I used to transfer pictures from my camera (then i would burn them to disk). After transferring files (from a wedding), I put away the drive. I plugged it in my desktop a couple days later to access them and make the disk and the drive faintly beeped a few times and the lcd lights flashed. It spinned up normally but my desktop stopped detecting it. I unplugged it and it would start the "spin up" but didn't get to a normal sound, then the lights continued to blink, no more beeping sounds and it's not being detected. It was suggested that it could be a dead physical drive, among other things. I took it to a repair place and they recommended freezing it to see if I could access it one more time to get data, but that didn't happen, they just suggested data recovery. From there i plugged it in one more time and it didn't even attempt to spin up or blink. I have another identical seagate ext. HD and I used it's power/usb cord just to make sure it wasn't the problem. I left it alone for about 3 weeks and plugged it back in by the tiny chance the technology fairies fixed it and it did spin up and the lights blinked. My computer made the incation sound that it read something was plugged into it, then it made the disconnect sound so it won't detect it specifically. I do not come close to having the money to send it in to a data recovery office but desperately need the wedding pictures off of it (I was the photographer). Is there any hope or am I completely screwed??? Thanks for any help!

if you took it to a repair centre and they confirmed the drive is bad, then to be honest the only way your going to get to those pictures is by a professional data recovery firm, look around the prices vary a lot. there's nothing you can do yourself to fix it, if the freezing never worked, in my opinion.

That is the reply from one repair place, but they also said they didn't really do much w/ external HD. If it helps at all, the device manager shows "Initio Combo Device Class" when I plug in the HD.