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"Vodka + Laptop = Ooops!"

OK, so there was a small incident earlier, involving a glass of vodka/red bull and a a friend's laptop. Unfortunately, the guilty party didn't alert anyone to this, and it was around 15 mins before anyone else realised. We found it with a BSOD. When we rebooted, it refused to find the hard drive - the BIOS wouldn't reocgnise it.

We removed the back of the laptop and dried it out as much as possible - there wasn't a huge amount of liquid inside - it wasnt flooding out or anything, but there was definite moisture inside.

We have tried everything we can think of to recover the data from the hard drive but to no avail. We tried another laptop hard drive in the drowned laptop and it booted fine. But trying the drowned hard disk in another laptop gave the same boot error - "Primary Hard Disk Drive Not Found. Fixed Optical Drive Not Found. No Bootable Devices. Press F1 to reboot, F2 to enter setup."

Unfortunately nobody has a laptop with more than one HDD socket, so we can't plug it in as a secondary device, and since it's a 2.5" laptop HDD, it's not compatible with my desktop 3.5" IDE connectors.

Just tried it again and there seemed to be more HDD activity - it whirred for a while then came up with "Disk Read Error". Any thoughts? He has some data on there he is really keen to get back.

We also tried using a Knoppix CD to boot an OS, but the DVD drive doesn't seem to be working either - it won't boot, although the lights are on on the drive and the eject mechanism works fine so there is definitely power there.

And I forgot the

bah-dum, tsch.

Wyndham wrote:
> Wait until the morning when it'll sober up.
> It should work then.

I was waiting for something like this!

Hehehe

If only it was that simple.

I doubt 'rinsing' the platters will do it any good!

Tell us how you get on!

It was vodka red bull in there to begin with. I think there's plenty of ethanol in there already! We're going to take it over to the computer science department tomorrow and see if they have any ideas. The clicking from the HDD sounds like the stepper motor for the read head getting stuck. We think the sugar from red bull has made the inside of the HDD sticky and the read head is sticking.

Our best idea so far is to see if the computer science department has any de-ionised distilled water we can use to rinse the HDD out with. Long shot though...

Wait until the morning when it'll sober up.
It should work then.

HHAT wrote:
> i'll evaporate away
how can you evaporate?

Dip the thing in ethanol.. it'll dry off the water and i'll evaporate away.

Sounds like a fun party...

'Let's take this laptop apart.. for fun!'

Got no idea? The BIOS won't detect the HDD so how would we check?

hmm the BIOS settings havent been reset have they?

The DVD drive doesn't appear to be working either - it wouldn't boot Knoppix. D'oh!