By far the most common reason why a hard drive would have no power is due to a power surge after an outage. IF the drive was not connected to a surge protector, the initial surge of power sends a high voltage of power to the drive, frying the electronic components.

Using the wrong power adapter could definitely cause serious electronic issues with your drive. If you drive no longer spins up, chances are that you used the wrong adapter and sent too much power to the drive and damaged electronic components.

We see a good amount of data recovery cases come in where the drive has no power due to liquid damage. If your hard drive has been exposed to any type of liquids, please don’t try to turn on the drive until the electronic components are treated properly.

Although this is very rare, some drives will develop power issues due to normal wear and tear. Drives are designed to last anywhere from 3-5 years. If your drive is much older than this, please consider moving the data to another drive.

We see many USB Drives that come in for data recovery with absolutely no power. No power issue on USB drives is almost always caused by a damaged USB connector. Majority of these cases are recoverable by attempting a “Chip Off” Recovery.

A “Chip-Off” recovery is where we unsolder the NAND chip (where data is stored), read the “dump” from this chip, then emulate the controller on our data recovery equipment and try to rebuild the data. These cases have a 90% success rate.

Absolutely no power on SD and MicroSD cards is also very common. These devices are a little different in the sense that most do NOT have a NAND chip that we can unsolder. These types of devices require a different type of recovery called “Monolith” Recovery.

In a “Monolith” Recovery, we sand down the entire top later of the storage device to reveal the special contact points. We make special connections to these points, then read the “dump” from the device and try to rebuild the data.