This may seem strange, but yes. You will want to at least format the drive and at least use DBAN. That part's obvious. The reason I say that is, my friend found a smashed up laptop in a forest near his house. It looked like no one was going to claim it (smashed screen, busted case, water-damaged internals, etc) so we tore it apart. I tried the hard drive (the only thing that wasn't rusted shut or worn to pieces) with a laptop-to-desktop IDE adapter and found that the drive was still intact. There was some music files on it that played fine. I personally immediately formatted the drive (which couldn't boot itself, but using DSL Linux liveCD I could read the contents) and installed Ubuntu, but if someone else had found it, they may have done a search for other information on it. So, that shows you, even left outside in rainstorms and whatever, a hard drive can survive a lot (though the drive did finally die a few weeks ago, but it lasted a good year after I formatted it again and put it in my old FTP server).