Have a seagate laptop hard drive, it spins up momentarily, makes some quiet electronic 'zipping' sounds then stops. After this, it is still reachable by the seagate utility, which says the hard drive is experiencing too many read errors, but the platters are definately not spinning.

Aside from replacing the controller, or banging it with a hammer, does anyone have any ideas for this?

I would say that it is FUBAR dude sorry - but I know if you really need to get something off you can try freezing it - I had a buddy who was able to get some stuff off his by doing that...but it may be beyond that..

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If there is valuable data on this laptop, that needs to be recovered, please DON'T replace the controller, bang it with a hammer (for what should that be good? It is a hard-drive, not an oldtimer car or something.) or freeze it. You will only damage it more. Bring it to a professional institute for data recovering.
If it is only your private hard-disk and you only want it to work again, forget it, just replace it.

@ADxD_7: Please don't recommend such things like freezing hard-disks, without asking if the data on it may be valuable. If the OP follows your advice it might be that the data will become even more difficult (if not impossible) to recover.

I grabbed a replica of the drive and replaced the controller, and was able to get it to work again long enough to get the data off of it.

Thanks for the help.

If I were not able to get the information off it, I would have had a professional data recovery service do it.

But you are aware that your change of the electronics could have been ended so, that your data were unrecoverable? If this was the drive of a company computer with valuable/important data on it, and I were your boss, you were currently unemployed.

But anyways. you had luck, and that is a good thing.