Well, ST-225s had a particularly bad reputation back then and it was almost the end of Seagate over it.
Seems there was a nasty little SIP IC on the board, proprietary, of course that, at any given time, had a life expectancy of about as long as it took to turn on the computer.
It never went when it was running, just at power up and power down (so they say, although I don't know how they could tell if it ever went at powerdown, as it might have gone the next time you powered it up LOL).
The point is, when it went, you could either spend half the amount of a new drive getting it repaired or have a very nice paperweight like, oh, say, the one I have on my desk here.
If they REALLY need to get the info off it, have them ship it to me and I'll get the data off in a format they'll be able to read. I have the required AT/XT switchable KBs, TTL monitors and a system with all 4 kinds of floppy drives in it (cute little TMC Research IFSP-1.30 Multi I/O with dual 2 floppy connectors and an IDE controller plus your basic dual serial, parallel and game port) Hell, I even have a few ST-11Ms around in case I have to change the controller.
Anyway, I offered.