Yeap I concur, grab yourself a docking station or cheap usb to sata tool of ebay, range from £10-20, mines invaluable for my IT work, number of drives its helped me with I cant even count, right now I'm low level formatting & surface scanning some nas drives to sell, certainly this will help to determine the issue.
Just realise usb mode doesnt work that well with drive tools like seatools, best to plug directly into a board ide or sata port to diagnose, as it allows full use of a programs diag tools, hence why I have desktop for this job as laptops are not as flexible for these jobs.
Can always send it to me to test on my systems, if can recover data then I will, if not then if its a sata drive, I have some new drives spare I keep in stock incase of client issues, PM if interested.