Seagate Expansion Desktop strange failure

Yesterday my USB drive (Seagate Expansion Desktop 2TB) failed in a strange way. Let me describe the symptoms:

- When I power on the laptop with the disk attached, the boot process (or rather POST) is very long. The drive always spins up, but in this case I only get a blinking light. Nothing happens. No access to the drive whatsoever.

- When I attach the drive to my already running laptop, the disk spins up, make a strange noise that is identical to removing the power from the disc, then it spins down, and the process repeats itself like 10 times. When the disk is fully spinning, the drive is showing in My Computer and Disk Management, but because it makes that power-lost sound it Iimmediately disappears, and the process repeats itself.

I tried plugging it to my netbook - drive spins fine, no "reset", but I can't install the driver. It properly discovers the name of the drive, but driver installation always fails.

I opened it and plugged it the USB to SATA card from the other disk. It runs good, no "restarts", but because those two discs use different USB connectors I can't see if it's working in Windows.

Any suggestions? Is this failure fatal? Can I recover the data from this drive?

I don't have any proper SATA motherboard, so I can't connect the disk directly to check if it's working.

Thanks for any tips.