If the local repair shop is right and the drive motor has failed then it is likely to be very difficult (read expensive) to recover the data off it.
The drive should be under warranty, I think Seagate drives have at least 1year.
That doesn't help with your data I know, but for future reference, it is really important to keep backups (a second copy on another drive). External drives are much more likely to fail or get corrupted or simply lost or stolen than internal drives. For photos it is very cheap to burn them to DVD.
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For the sake of your own health and sanity, if your data is important to you, keep a second copy on another storage (a backup)
