It is in the drive itself, not your power connector.
I have some of the drives from the newer Vip722 that were in a fire.
The drives are fine but the dvr have smoke damage.
The drives will not spin up without being connected via sata cable to the dvr.
The procedure is basically , connect the power from the pc to the drive, connect the sata cable to the dvr.
Turn on the dvr and wait about 15 seconds, the drive will spin up as soon as the dvr boots.
Then you can swap out the sata cable with the pc and it will work like any other drive until the drive is powered down.
If you try to connect it directly to the pc without starting off the dvr, the drive will appear dead except it will show on the pc bios as a blank space, no name, just blank.
Now the interesting part.
If you have Ubuntu 8.10 installed it too can spin up the drive, with no swap tricks, just install into pc and use like any other drive.
It will show under the logs as :
ata2.00: HPA unlocked: 488395055 -> 488397168, native 488397168
ata2.00: ATA-7: ST3250620AS, 3.AAK, max UDMA/133
ata2.00: 488397168 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
These are 500GB WD drives.
So I'm guessing it is in the power up code.
The contents of the drive are encrypted with linux partitions so don't think you will be copying off recorded content