[mdlug] Lemonade on laptop erases hard drive?

[Aaron Kulkis]

David Lee Lambert 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? 

Electronics cleaner (and a lot of it!) to thoroughly wash out
the lemonade.  Of course, if you remove the hard drives and
optical drives, you can wash it out with water (and then
use the electronics cleaner to flush out water so that it
will dry more quickly), and clean the hard drive and the
optical drive separately.

This will solve your "Q"-key problem.

> 
> 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.  
>