[mdlug] Lemonade on laptop erases hard drive?

[Rich Elswick]

photorec and autopsy are your friends.  Don't know if you can recover any
files as I don't have experience with Yellow stuff on computers.  Or was it
Pink....

On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 7:27 AM, David Lee Lambert <davidl at lmert.com> wrote:

> 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)
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-- 
Rich Elswick