What it is
Electrical failure means the drive's electronics have stopped working. A power surge, a wrong power adapter, a short or a dropped connector can each do it. On a hard drive it's usually the circuit board. On an external drive it can be the small USB board inside the case. On a USB stick or memory card it's often a snapped connector or a bent board.
The good news is that the data sits on the platters or memory chip, not on the parts that failed.
What you might notice
- Completely silent: no spin, no lights, nothing.
- A burning smell, or it died right after a storm or a power change.
- Not detected at all by any computer.
- A USB stick or card that snapped, bent or got wet.
Why swapping the board rarely works
It seems logical to put the board from an identical drive onto yours. On anything made in the last 15 years, it almost never works. Each board carries information unique to its own drive, and without it the drive can't make sense of its own platters.
Some external drives, including many WD models, also encrypt your data on their USB board even if you never set a password. Lose or crack that board and a perfectly healthy drive becomes unreadable. Keep every piece, and don't keep plugging it in to test it.
What we do about it
We test the drive and its electronics separately to find exactly what failed. Damaged parts are repaired or replaced, and when a board has to be replaced, the information unique to your drive is moved onto the new one.
For a broken USB stick or card, a connector or board repair is often all it needs. When the controller itself has died, we read the memory chip directly and rebuild the files from it. Either way, the device is read once onto separate storage and your files are rebuilt from that copy.
What's possible, and what isn't
A board or connector fault often leaves the data untouched, as long as the original parts are kept and nobody has forced more power through the drive. Encrypted drives still need the original board, or the password or key.
If a surge also damaged the memory chip or the platters, that changes the job. The evaluation tells you which, before any recovery work starts.