Coffee Spilled On Laptop

[icarus88]

Advice from my computer tech friends after a coffee misshap:

Peter to Usual Suspects,
coffee in a laptop - oh no! ...question for the group
A co-worker's husband spilled coffee into his
Dell laptop. He has since had a tech out to get
the computer up and running. In order to get the
computer working the tech took the hard drive out
and told my co-

Comments

[netik]

These comments are mostly correct, but I think the thing to do here is to try the drive in a different machine. Visually inspect the drive and make sure there's no liquid residue or damage to the drive before plugging it in.

Hard drives are SEALED DEVICES with only a single hole for air flow. I doubt there is coffee inside the drive.

Chances are is that the drive's controller board shorted out (if it doesn't work on a different machine.) Sometimes these drives can be recovered by purchasing an exact copy of the hard drive (Same make/model/size) and swapping the hard drive's controller board. I've done that before with reasonable success.