Gone for good?

I spilled coffee all over my laptop 2 days ago. I let it dry out over night after removing the battery, and it actually went on in the morning. I rebooted it, as requested, and Windows opened up, I got online, and, aside from sticking keys, all was back to normal...for about a half hour. It froze up then went back to the reboot screen, and has been there ever since. Am I at the point where I need to reset the drivers and utilities from the manufacture's disk (Dell Insperion, Windows 7)? If so, as I read in another thread, I will lose everything that I haven't backed up, correct (that is a lot of stuff)? I suppose this is grasping at straws, but is there any way to back up my hard drive while in this current situation?

FWIW, I'm not tech-savy, so opening up the computer, getting to the mother board, etc. would not be easy for me. Does that alone have me screwed?

 

Letting it sit overnight was not near long enough! If you don't have the skillset and tools (including a properly equipped air compressor) to immediately disassemble and blast out any and all moisture, you MUST let it sit for an extended period to ensure all has evaporated from the deepest recesses of the notebook interior.

You should have let it sit (flipping over periodically) for several days, preferably with a fan blowing on it at all times. This assumes, as plodr noted, you had no sugar, milk or creamer in your coffee.

I fear there was still some coffee inside which created a short, or several shorts when you inserted the battery and/or applied power. Not good!

There's no shame in taking it to an expert for service - the red face act was eating, drinking and [hopefully not] smoking while using your notebook. Doing so over a PC keyboard is one thing, but when the computer sits under the notebook keyboard, its a whole new ballgame.

Removing the HD is not technically difficult so I agree with plodr here too. You could install the drive into an enclosure attached to another computer, or you could install the HD into the second computer as a secondary (NOT boot) drive and hopefully access your files.

Good luck!

 

Thanks for the input! Now let me ask, when you say taking out the hd and installing it in a closure attached to another computer - is the closure a whole other piece of hardware?

If I were to install it into a second computer, can I assume taking out the hd on that one would be necessary (and then reinstalling it obviously).

The only reason that I would hesitate bringing it to an expert is the amount they will charge. I'm not in a financial position to spend hundreds of dollars.

 

This is probably my favorite tool, and it's useful for multiple drives:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...E16812161002&gclid=CJOEq4Ll7rgCFQSk4AodsQ8AaA

~ OR ~

You could choose from one of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...6261 600006274&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&Pagesize=50

 

I use a docking station because I swap out drives a lot. Before the docking station, I used a simple adapter cable.

Enclosures are great if you will be leaving the drive in the enclosure. It puts the somewhat fragile devices in a protective case, but allows you to use the drive with different computers.

Installing into a computer as secondary drive would be more of a permanent solution, but likely free too since it is likely your power supply has an extra cable for it. And most people have, or know someone who has spare data cables.

 

I just got one of these docks as it lets you clone drives without being connected to a computer and supports 4Tb drives but the downside is no eSATA
The clone function seems to work well but is a bit slow
Or maybe it was coz I was in a hurry and cloning an almost full 3Tb drive rolleyes

My old dock has eSATA and USB 3.0 and is the earlier model of this dock and is the ugly red and black model with a plugpack power supply that runs so hot that I expected it to blow up in the first week but it is now 3 years old and still going :confused

The adapter cables are very good if you won't be using a dock or an enclosure very often and they are much cheaper. They can be cable tied into a small neat bundle so I keep one in a pouch in my briefcase for when I go to the office. When I use it I just cut the cable tie off and plug it in. Having it has saved the day many times over :-D

 

For it to clone without being connected to a computer means the device must be intelligent and have a decent buffer to work in. That means it contains basically a small, dedicated computer and RAM built in - not to mention power and interface connections - all for $60. No doubt, it is not a quad-core, 3GHz CPU with 8Gb of RAM running over a fast bus. So transferring data would take a long time regardless the amount of data being transferred, but for sure, 3Tb of data would be a "walk away and come back tomorrow" event.

 

Yep that is 100% correct and it will just have a dedicated cheap industrial grade micro controller chip with a PROM or EPROM that is really cheap might even be a one chip solution logic controller

Took overnight both times I have used it standalone but you can also connect it to a PC by USB 3.0 which is much faster but still not quite as fast as my old eSATA one

Hehehe for only $59 I guess I don't expect too much performance and if you aren't in a hurry it works fine

 

Thank you very much guys. Keep your fingers crossed!

 

So I found out that my hard drive was fried, and I had to get a new one installed. The keyboard was cleaned out as best as possible, but some keys are still just a tiny bit sticky. That's not the problem. though. Often, when I'm in the middle of typing either the cursor will disappear so I can't finish what I'm typing (although it does come back when I click the place where it left off). Other times it will jump to another part of what I'm typing - for instance, right into the middle of another word. Then I will have to find it and cut out what I was typing and paste it back into place. Every once in a while, the passage will just disappear and the page will scroll up to the top. Everything returns, however, when I refresh the page.

What could it be, and how do I stop it?