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My 1.5tb Seagate hard drive has died, where can I go to retrieve the pitures from it and how much would I be looking at paying?

Depends what 'dead' means, is it internal, external, is it 2.5" or 3.5", does it show anything in (presumably) windows, can you access it but the data is just not there, does it rattle, does it click, any signs of life at all, etc, etc?

Hard to say without more info.

external hard drive makes a beeping noise every few seconds when plugged in.

Then after a few minutes, it stops beeping and does nothing, doesn’t seem to spin up or make a noise or anything.

There is a company that can recover stuff from hard drives but, you would need a mortgage and and arm and three legs to pay, a few years ago it was £400, do a search on the net to see if someone does it cheaper.

£395 if it's a firmware problem or £495 if it's a mechanical failure

Cathie if you have no joy with it, PM me and I'll give you a few options that can be taken.
Pete

It just may be worth trying connecting it to another PC or laptop and if it works get the data copied straight away. I had a similar problem and the external hard drive would not work on my pc but did on the laptop.

If its an external drive I'd dismantle it and take the bare drive out of the caddy and test it in a machine or another caddy.

Quite often I've been tasked with this job and its the controller that's failed and the drive has been fine.

Hello Cathy. my daughter had the same problem there is a computer repair shop called Akita consoles 387 poulton road he was very reasonable

+1 for what Gibbo says. I had a hard drive "fail" as described but in fact the drive itself was OK the failure was in the controller gubbins that operates the drive. The actual hard drive simply plugs into the controller unit. I bought a new controller unit off Ebay (about £8 a couple of years ago) plugged the old drive into that and BINGO! it all worked. The controller unit off Ebay was hardly the best quality - but it did work and I only needed it the once to allow me to copy everything off the mounted hard drive onto a new unit.

Snod

+1 for removing it from the enclosure.

I did read that putting it in the freezer overnight worked as a last resort. It can get you 10-15 mins worth of use, enough to extract important data.

Cheapest option and easiest test is to plug it into a diffrent usb slot.

2nd try using a diffrent usb lead.
If the cable is faulty then its fixed with a new cable.

3rd as above you need a usb to sata lead from ebay. You will have to dismantle the external drive to gain access. To connect the lead from ebay. But maybe open the casing first.

If its a physical issue with the drive its going to be costly. So you need to explore as many cheaper options first.

This is an example of what could do the job.
http://m.ebay.co.uk/itm/USB-2-0-to-SATA-IDE-2-5-3-5-Hard-Drive-Adapter-Cable-SY-/180644338624

If you have dropped it as its been turned on then it could be physical issues.

This is why the cloud is becoming more popular as a 2nd back up.

thanks for all the comments.

I work in the IT department so tasked this to one of "the guys", we tried plugging it into 3 different machines, tried taking the HD out and putting it into a new machine, tried putting it into the freezer for a few hours (all wrapped up of course) and tried taking it apart in a sterile environment and moving the thingies (!!!!) back away from the laser (or something like that) put it back together, put it in a new machine and....nothing

I'll try the place on Poulton Rd but it looks like it'll have to go on the "THINGS TO DO AFTER CHRISTMAS" list