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John is right. Not only hard drives, but you can also salvage smaller appliances. A co-worker fell in a river and lost his Blackberry PDA. That was on Friday. I heard about it on Monday and brought my diving gear to work on Tuesday. I recovered the Blackberry and rinsed it with purified (I didn't have distilled handy) water. I kept it wet until I got home and could take it apart to clean it. After cleaning, I let it dry out for about 24 hours, assembled it, and put the battery back in. It powered up and worked! The battery wouldn't take a new charge, but with a replacement battery, the unit is still working.
There are two lessons here. Don't let it dry out until you flush all the crud out and don't power it up while it is still wet, especially if the water wasn't clean. For your sake and the appliance's If you do, you should probably say goodbye first.
Tom Johnson
Technical Writer
tjohnson -at- starcutter -dot- com
John Posada wrote:
When my employer got involved in disaster recovery projects, usualy
in buildings that had fires on upper floors where the water used to
put out the fire soaked everything on the floors below it, one of the
things we told our customers was NOT to dry the hard disk from water
before sending it off to be recovered once it got wet. It's once it
dries that the muck becomes a permanent part of the disk surface and
the surface of the disk starts to flake.
We literally supplied 55 gal plastic garbage cans filled with
distilled water for picking up the hard disks...had them submerge the
whole PC or server box right in the water.
John Posada
Senior Technical Writer
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