[mdlug] Lemonade on laptop erases hard drive?

[David Lee Lambert]

About 15 months ago I got my wife a new laptop at the CompUSA 
going-out-of-business sale.  It came with Windows XP,  so I uninstalled the 
most annoying trial-software and installed Open Office to see how that would 
work.  She mostly used it for e-mail, web-browsing, and watching DVDs,  but 
at one point I backed up most of our pictures to it.  I might also have some 
nonessential drafts of my resume on there.

Recently my son was looking at Google Earth with it and accidentally dumped a 
cup of lemonade on the keyboard. We shut it down and tried to dry it out.  
When I booted it up again, it came to a blank screen with a cursor flashing 
in one corner.

Later I tried to boot with an old, somewhat scratched,  Knoppix CD.  It came 
up fine,  but I could tell that some of the keys didn't work properly on the 
keyboard (hitting "q" once caused about 4 characters to appear on the 
screen).  I could see 3 partitions on the hard-drive:  the NTFS boot 
partition,  the FAT32 recovery partition, and a third partition (probably 
another part of the recovery process).  I could mount the recovery partition,  
but I got an error trying to mount the NTFS partition.  Other core utilities 
crashed as well,  so I figured the scratches on the Knoppix CD were 
significant.

I also booted into the BIOS and ran a built-in hard-disk check utility. It 
said the hard-disk was fine.  (By the way,  this is a 2.5" 100GB+ SATA drive 
in a place where there was no dried lemonade).

I ordered a new keyboard and burned a new Knoppix CD (the late-2008 version).  
I couldn't get X or the network to work,  but I could boot to runlevel 3.  
This version of Knoppix still refused to mount the NTFS filesystem,  and 
ntfsls only showed one file on it, a ".ini" file.  The FAT32 filesystem is 
still fine.

I don't have any other computers with SATA adapters;  but if I did (say if I 
got a USB-SATA adapter for my Ubuntu box, or for another Windows XP system I 
might have access to),  how likely would I be to be able to recover files 
from that disk?  What other tools would I want to use? 

The bright side here is that I might just repartition the drive and install 
Linux,  rather that trying to activate the recovery-partition and reinstall 
Windows.  

-- 
David Lee Lambert ... Software Developer, IBM, member IEEE, ACM
Cell phone: +1 586-873-8813
work e-mail:  dllamber at us.ibm.com
IM: davidleelambert (Yahoo!) or lamber45 at cse.msu.edu (MSN)