damaged lappy

bernifish

Beta member
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Location
austria
Hello techies, i wonder if anyone can give some advice.
last year my husband spilt a glass of red wine on his lappy. we did our best and dried it out but the screen remained black. i took out the hard drive and copied all the important pics and documents onto a external hard drive. so far so good. yesterday i took out the damaged lappy, and thought that before i would chuck it, i would try again.
It boots up ok, and the screen is once again operational, BUT it cannot see the hard drive. i have obviously put the original hard drive back in place, but the system tells me there is no drive there.
my question is, should i buy a new hard drive to see if that will be accepted, or is it all a lost cause and should I bin the whole thing?
Any advice will be great. thanks bernadettte:
 
If you buy a new drive, you will need to re-install the OS and all programs as well as restore the important pics and documents you backed up. Do you have restore disks available?

I imagine you have already done this but I would check and recheck that you got the hard drive fully reseated when you re-installed it. Unlikely that you could insert it incorrectly but perhaps it isn't completely inserted into the connector.

However it was that you powered up the drive to copy files to external drive, try that again. Are you still able to access the drive? If so, then the drive is OK but the laptop has a problem and a new drive won't help you.
 
I imagine you have already done this but I would check and recheck that you got the hard drive fully reseated when you re-installed it. Unlikely that you could insert it incorrectly but perhaps it isn't completely inserted into the connector.

However it was that you powered up the drive to copy files to external drive, try that again. Are you still able to access the drive? If so, then the drive is OK but the laptop has a problem and a new drive won't help you.

+1 to both of these suggestions. Try the HDD again by hooking up to another computer and see if you can still access it. My bet is that it's a problem with the laptop itself since wine was spilled on it; most likely corroded components.
 
I used to work in a laptop shop, we got lots of spills. I would first totally disassemble it, then clean everything inside (including the board, with appropriate electronics cleaner), reassemble, and over 70% of the time the electronics survived and they came back to life - give it a shot
 
I used to work in a laptop shop, we got lots of spills. I would first totally disassemble it, then clean everything inside (including the board, with appropriate electronics cleaner), reassemble, and over 70% of the time the electronics survived and they came back to life - give it a shot

Usually has to be done immediately to be the most effective, and not turn it on between the time the spill happened and when you intend to disassemble/clean it.
 
Once corrosion has set into the board, it's done for usually, especially if it's set for this long. It doesn't just corrode on what you can see, but will travel up into the IC's.
 
in answer to the two above; I don't recall what cleaner we used, that was a long time ago, but it was some electronics cleaner and it came in a spray can.

I respect your opinion, but I fixed 'em everyday for years, all the time. I think newer model laptops are more spill resistant than the older ones.
 
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