Disaster Recovery - Hurricane

I'd start by dismantling the machine to the board / card / assembly level and spray everything thoroughly with a commercial electronic component cleaner. I have a buddy who suggested WD-40, but wait and see what someone else has to say before taking these suggestions. We could be completely out to lunch.

It's more trouble to clean mice and keyboards than it's worth. Printers, scanners, and other devices with moving parts are probably unrepairable; you'll never get all the debris out of the paper path, rollers, gears, etc.

I wouldn't try to power up a water-damaged monitor at all. That sounds like a fast ride to Electrocution City.

Palmetto has some good suggestions as far as the keyboard, mouse and monitor go it may be better to just replace.

My Dad was in FL last year in the hurricans and his computer got hit. I told him just make sure the inside is clean and dry and then good luck. He cleaned out the inside and let it sit a couple of days opened up. He was able to plug it in and it worked fine and still does. So it is possible to clean. I would take some canned air and blow into the vents on the power supply to make sure it is dry. There are a couple of big capacitors in them and if they are wet they will fry.

I don't have experience using WD-40 to clean out a computer but my initial concern would we any type of residue it leaves behind.

Hope your able to get the computers back up and running.

Some might interpret your post as an "ambulance chasing" effort to solicit business at the expense of hurricane victims.

You would have appeared less opportunistic had you included reasons for not attempting repairs. These could have included potential irretreivable loss of data by spinning up damaged drives. As a DR professional, I'm sure you can come up with more, better reasons you can share with us.

There are non-business users who surf the web, read and discard their e-mail, and use their computer as an entertainment device. To them, the hardware costs are significant, and the data is not worth the cost of recovering it.

But come on even I am not low enough to start considering advertising to the victims of this disaster as a way of drumming up business. However, I think this could be opportuity for your company to get some free publicity by donating some of your time and wonderful resources to helping small business and individuals who need data receovery. I mean how many businesses might be saved by such gestures. We certainly don't need another aftermath like that of 9/11. I mean there was nithing left to recover then, however, this time there is. New Orleans may not be New York but there could be significant economic backlash. We in the IT industry know more than most the value our service could have in making or breaking the recovery from this disaster.

There is Mud and God only knows what else inside these things. It is something that you have to smell to believe and then you'll know what I mean.

Then you have to consider at what stage the equipment is at if it has been pulled out of the water and left for days I would be junking everything and only grabbing the HDD's and sending them off for Data Recovery.

However if they are still under water there are some steps that you can take to save the units.

First remove them from the water and submerge them in clean water until you are ready to start working on them DO NOT ALLOW THEN TO DRY OUT!!!!!!

When you are ready to start first remove the covers be it on a printer/Monitor/ computer or whatever and then remove the unit from the water and hose out all the muck that is inside it. You will find a lot of mud and other rubbish has found its way into these units. Remember to do the same to the Power Supplies with the computers as well and not just the cases as you'll create a Short Circuit if you do not clean out the Power Supplies as well as the rest of the computer. HDD's have air holes in them so I wouldn't even consider attempting to recover them just send them away in Clean Water to get the data Recovered.

After you have cleaned all of the built up rubbish out of the cases you can then leave the units in the Sun to Air Dry for several days remembering to not allow them to remain in the elements after nightfall. You should also liberally give them a good dose of WD 40 or something similar to prevent corrosion but only after the bulk of the water has dried off the M'Board and other parts. Remember that a M'Board that has been underwater for weeks will have absorbed a lot of water and may even delaminate if not handled properly so clean them out and then drown them in WD 40 RP 7 or whatever as this will displace most of the surface water and place a coating over the electrical connections.

For Floppy Drives I would just be junking them as they are not worth the time and effort in cleaning out and the same applies to CD/DVD Drives all Readers Recorders & Rewritable types. Also do not forget the Power Supply when you do this.

After the initial clean out and Water Displacement dismantle the units to component level and clean them again with Electrical Cleaner until things run clean nd then hit them again with WD 40 RP 7 or what ever else you have handy depending on Brand Names where you live.

We did this in 1974 when there was a flood here to several Main Frames so things where a little different we used a Fire Hose to clean them out with initially and had bought several 5 Gallon drums of WD 40 and as the water went down we hit them all with the fire hose to clean out the much and then shoveled out the muck from the buildings.

The ones that we got to as the water receded worked perfectly but after 3 days of no longer being submerged these units where written off as they could not be salvaged. The ones that we did save and got to immediately worked for the rest of their Taxable Life without increased breakdowns and where as reliable as new units that we fitted to places that we couldn't immediately get into to clean out and waterproof the hardware. We didn't bother to much about individual workstations as the real money was in the Main Frame Rooms but every workstation in the Main Frame Rooms was salvaged and worked perfectly when we did the same to it as we did to the Main Frames but of course we junked the Keyboards as they just where not worth the effort and waste of time as we could replace them cheaper than spending several hours labor recovering.

I hope that is of some help to you.

Col

Be careful as the water will be contaminated by excrament etc. Wear suitable gloves - you do NOT want to get any of the dirt into your bloodstream as that could prove life threatening.

Junk all the equipment and retain the drives for data recovery. That was our line following a server room flood some few years back.

Good luck.

I have lived on and around water most of my life and have seen amazing preservations and more amazing disintegrations from cellular phones dropped overboard to shipwrecks-in-progress and here is the fast-track crash course outline. Salt water immersions need immediate reimmersion into fresh water followed by moisture-displacement treatments like yes, WD40. Beware of commercial electronics cleaners on fragile circuit boards. I have seen salt maintain an electrical circuit path and that same path disappear with the first application of an electronic contact cleaner. Also if the initial immersion/flooding was near live circuits then many anode/cathode points were short-circuited into cyber space. Battery terminals are only nubs. After the active electron attack comes a passive muck and sludge attack and what doesn't calcify into a hard layer is eaten away by little bugs. If what was submerged found a fresh water respite then you can rescue quite a bit of electronic and electrical equipment but it will be like what you find any given day at a flea market - pleasant surprises, sobered pipe dreams and an occasional real score. Good luck, Steve, Journeyman Marine Electronics Technician/Electrician, formerly of Honolulu and Pearl Harbor Shipyards, I.B.E.W. 1186.

Check out http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm for a software app called SpinRite6. It can be used to recover a hard drive's data.

Search the internet better-set up www.google.com/alerts and use the key words "data recovery".Also get in touch with www.Google.com/answers - I am sure the wonderful search co will come up with something-do get in touch with http://slashdot.org - ask slashdot column is there.
Use stumble upon toolbar available for free from www.stumbleupon.com and build your community and post in relevant forums and contact some of the wonderful users and be sure to check the stumbles of all users.
best of luck

Parvez

The Test equipment tech at Magnovox did this procedure on Tectronix scopes:

1. After removing power open the chassis.
2. Use a mild soapy water spray and rinse off the inside of the chassis, mother boards and other components.
3. Rinse with clean watrer.
4. Put in a 120 degree F oven for 30 minutes to dry off.
5. Lay the chassis open for 24 hours.
Note on a windows PC the power suppies will have to be open and cleaned in a similar manner.

Chester

No easy answers... In 1972 PA experienced extreme, wide-spread flooding. I was in electronics field at time, so I worked trying to recover many of the 2-way radios that had been submerged while installed in vehicles.

We found that the contaminents in the water actually 'ate' the metalic exterior of the transistors, attacked anything metal, and was virtually impossible to eliminate. ...and this was fresh water!

Someone else mentioned 'clean' water. IMO, you have no chance for long-term recovery if you do not use distilled water. Give equipment a distilled water bath (to re-disolve contaminents), rinse thoroughly (distilled water, again!), and blow dry (we even used oven in some cases) to evaporate the remaining water.

My focus would be (only?) the HDD. If you recover the HDD, you have *effectively* recovered the computer. Recover the HDD and place in new computer.

Don't expect a high success rate... good luck.

I have a great deal of experience with recovery of US Navy motors and (large) cables flooded with salt water. First, if the salt has dried, it is next to impossible to remove - residue will adsorb more dampness from the atmosphere. Flood, and drain, with clean water several times to remove all traces of the contamination - dont hurry this. Then bake at a reasonable temperature until throughly dry. Inspect and clean as much as possible before applying any power.
Again, if the salt has dried, forget it.
Richard Law, USN (Ret)

Here in West Texas we have our share of fires .. with fires come firemen and lots of water. I have been successful in the past with recovering customer equipment from smoke, water, and debris with some simple items available in most cities.
First ... rinse everything with purified water thouroughly.
Second ... rinse again with purified water and denatured alcohol (50/50 mix)
Third ... use a cleaner such as Blue Shower (name may vary depending on brand ... get the generic) this can be purchased at most electronic supply stores.
Let the unit sit open with a fan blowing into it for several days.
Disconnect the power supply and test it first. Typically if it doesnt blow out when you give it power it might be ok. If it doesnt blow then reconnect it to the unit and try again without your hard drive attached. If that works then reconnect the hard drive.
Throw away the keyboard, mouse, and anything like printers, scanners, etc.
I wouldn't do anything with the monitor as there is to great a potential to hurt yourself and anyone in close proximity.
If nothing comes up you may be able to retrieve data from the hard drive and your only out ~$30 for supplies.
Hope it helps.
Geek

Time is money! To get a commercial site up fast you must have a good plan. After a flood at one of our bank branch locations, we found that the workstation motherboards were fried because the machines were plugged in during the flood. Monitors, keyboards and mice were OK becuase they were above the water level. We replaced all workstations and a server, restored basic workstation configurations with Norton Ghost, then server data from Network Attached offsite storage. We partner with an excellent IBM, Novell, Symantec, Microsoft vendor and have a contract for Disaster Recovery. We had a plan, tested it, review it regularly, and it worked.
Costs? + or - $20,000. Results - Priceless!
Flood occured on a Thursday evening, cleanup took place Friday, equipment was replaced by late Monday, configured Tuesday, and the branch open on Wednesday of the following week.
Lessons learned: Keep workstations and servers off of the floor, keep backups off site or on NAS, have a plan, review and practice for a disaster before it happens, follow your plan when it is needed.

After Isabel 2 years ago I ended up tossing out the key boards and mice, and one monitor. For the 2 machines. I opened them up used a can of air to remove and debris, then used a spay bottle with clean water on the inside and dryed with a fan in a room with A/C and closed the door for 3 days. One machine powered on Ok but the other had a drive failure. After putting the drive in the freezer for about an hour I was able to recover the data. I am actually still using it on a machine my kids use for games.

Well, I've restored people's computers before and recently aquired one that someone found in the dumpster. It was a mess. They did get it to turn on, miraculously, though. Here's some of my own computer clean up tips:

1. Use a toothbrush to get into the right places. Use a dry one to erode off caked gunk like dust, mud, etc. Then a vacuum cleaner to carefully vacuum off the dust.

2. Clean all circuit boards and motherboard with rubbing alcohol. This is what we used when I was doing electronic assembly, btw. This cleans and also dissapates quickly. I find this safer than plain water.

3. When working on monitors, be very careful! The components inside a monitor can carry dangerously high voltage! If a monitor needs cleaning, make sure it has been off and UNPLUGGED for AT LEAST 24 - 48 hours. Even if power has been off in the area, there's not telling if it was on briefly or not as utility companies try and restore power or test lines, etc. Unplug it anyway and wait a day or two before opening the case. Don't touch anything in the monitor with your bare hands or with metal objects.

4. Put everything together and attempt to power up. If anything does NOT power up, no fans, no power lights, then suspect the power supply. For PCs you can get them online most places that sell computer parts. For monitors, I'd toss it and get another monitor.

5. If it powers up but doesn't boot or boots but has other failures, be sure to double-check all cables and motherboard jumper settings.

6. Also clean the keyboard and mouse. These can be also disassembled and cleaned. For keyboards, I have used window cleaner, or rubbing alcohol. NEVER use BOTH. Wash the plastic parts in warm soapy water and leave dry COMPLETELY before assembling.

7. Any parts that just don't want to work even after cleaning, just toss and replace if you can.

Hope this helps...

I just went through the hurricane - and yes it was bad... worse I've seen in over 45 years. Regarding recovery - best advise is to back up! If a unit is water logged, let dry out for at least a week, and the unit should recover - provided it was unplugged during the time it got wet. However, almost all hurricane related flooding in the south will be a mixture of fresh/salt water. So don't count on longetivity of the recovered unit. Get it up and get your data off...and replace the unit. I have a computer business and the worse thing in this area is oxidation. De-oxidizers help, but are only short term.

The motherboards can be recovered by removing from cases and washing in a solution of Ivory dishwashing soap and water. Scrub good with camel hair brush to remove dirt. Blow dry with compressed air. The trick then is to dip the boards in 192 proof moonshine or everclear alcohol. This step is necessary to remove the water that you can not blow out from under the chips. After dipping in alcohol blow dry again and the motherboards will be ready to plug up and operate. I used this method on computers that were flooded in Elba, Alabama and recovered all of them that I cleaned. If you have floppies that you need to clean remove them from their old case wash with alcohol and place in new cases. Hard disk can be opened up and water removed, washed in alcohol and blow dryed with compressed air. I had about 50% recovery using this method on hard disk. I even cleaned keyboards using this method; however, they are so cheap now; it is a waste of time cleaning them. If I can be of further assistance feel free to contact me. tbarefo2@csc.com

One trick I know - which may save you a LOT of money - of course make certain everything is dry: IF the hard drive has no response, take off the top and give the top disk a spin. Chances are this will not apply, but this has saved my posterior in the event of a hard disk failure from mechanical cause.

The first step(s)

Perform triage - What is most valuable?

1. If the equipment is - it MAY be recoverable.

If it was powered off - there is a good likelihood that much of it can be re-used. A good deal of cleaning is required, and keep in mind that the contamination may present biological hazards. You don't want to be breathing or getting skin contact with the crud that found its way into your systems.

2. If the data is more valuable - how much more valuable?

You must decide which is the most viable, recovering or recreating. The costs associated with the manhours needed to recreate data are weighed against the costs of recovery.

As you may have gathered, the first few steps are of planning nature. The organizations affected need a two-pronged attack: how to continue/resume business at some level and how to get fully operational. Two groups are needed, but both must communicate.

If you have further questions, or need recommendations for data recovery, please contact me at:

s_norris@email.com

Best of Luck,
Sam Norris
National White Collar Crime Center

I have rinsed out computers with clean water, let sit for a couple of days with a hair dryer/fan blowing to dry everything out totally. As others have said, floppies and CD's are junk and just replace them. Living here in North Carolina, I have had the opportunity to use this method (unfortunately) several times. You can expect a 75% - 80% success rate as long as the systems were not powered when they were hit with the water, mud and goo.

A very important subset of data is software. Try to recover as much printed documentation, license registration numbers, purchase orders for software maintemance etc. - whatever will prove your ownership of licenses and maintenance agreement status, and also how to install& configure it, etc. so that you can get support from software sources. Also, if your "real" systems aren't going to be available immediately, put up something of an interim nature - even a spreadsheet - to capture business transactions that occur between the time of business restart and the time of "real" systems restart.

Disassemble to the components (take off memory, CPU and all daughter cards and wash separately)
Wash in clean water (I would rinse in distilled for the last rinse)
(I would use 90% rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle to displace the water and clean off any gunk)
Dry in a very warm room (100 degree plus) and let it be till completely dry a couple of damp rid packs wouldn?t be a bad idea
Inspect, assemble, pray
Don?t be afraid to toss any part that is cheaper or easier to replace then repair

USE ONLY NON RESIDULE ALCOHOL SPRAY OR LIQUID, THIS WILL DISPERSE WATER AND MOISTURE. WD40 WILL PROVIDE ELECTRICAL CONDUCTIVITY AND DAMAGE SOME OR ALL COMPONENTS WHEN ELECTRICITY IS APPLIED

A Fema individual who visited my place of Employment said that if it got wet get it out it will fail at some point. Since I work at a fairly important place to the community, we require 24/7 uptime, we are going with the suggestion. Replacing all hardware that got wet.

Go to autoparts palce and pickup can of Electronic Parts cleaner made by CRC. It made to clean and remove moisture from electronic parts. Won't leave oily residue that attachs dirt.

First, rinse the boards with distilled water to remove contamination. Follow with denatured alcohol for same. Dry thoroughly (heat lamps, hairdryers, paint drying booth). There are some commercial cleaners, but I wouldn't recommend WD40, since the residue it leaves will attract and bond with the dust for some really nasty guck.

If the equipment was energized when it was submerged, it is probably gone.

Use contact cleaner to clean pins and sockets, Caig Laboratories puts out some good stuff.

Be aware that anything showing a deposit on the Surface Mount pins will probably fail again. Once you have corrosion, it will probably continue. Laptops have been my worst problem, with all the stuff that people dump into them. I've had limited success using a follow-up coating because it also creates an insulation factor, thereby making it more prone to thermal failure. Only coat the pins on SM technology, not the entire chip.

I did try q-tips and denatured alcohol to clean some corroded SM stuff's pins. Worked for about a week, then the electrolosis effect of the contaminents shorted it out again. A costal area with high humidity would probably be worse.

I ran an AF cal/repair lab a while ago, and we did board washing with great results on mil-spec stuff.

Yep, we've done that too. Hosed a few Dells with fresh water and let them bake in the sun for a few days. Two out of three worked on that one.

I tried to recover a few machines from rain flooding in Houston a few years ago. The machines were submerged for a few hours at most. During this short time the boards on the hard drives corroded to the point components fell off the board. I would expect the best you can hope for is sending the drives to a recovery service. I used drive savers as they have replacement HD controllers they can use. Don?t waste your time trying to clean these machines. Even if you can get them to work they won?t last. The saltwater alone was enough to do permanent damage.

Disassemble the pc, everything should cvome out. Clean with soap and water using a soft brush, and rinse well. Blow off with compressed air and bath in alcohol or crc electronics cleaner. All the fans, keyboards, mice, cd and floppy drives are better off tossed. Be sure to be extra carefull cleaning the power supply and monitor. Better off taking them to the shop. Even better just replace the machine.

about 8 weeks ago I had a flood 8" sprinkler main flooded plant and computer room. I suffered mainly from blown powersupplies in Pcs. Popping in new ones got me running but water was not as high as disk drives If things can get dried out with achaol and no surface rust appears on boards you might be ok.

How important is the data on the computers? If you are running you business on them, I would just remove the hard drives and send them to a data recover specialist like On-Track.

If the data isn?t important, I would throw them away. No matter how much you clean them some residue will remain and they will fail in the near future.

I've been in IT for 23 yrs, and seen my share of IT messes. Any moisture exposure like salt or muck on an pcb will eat the component traces out in short order. Even with alcohol baths, air-blown and baked, you may get a pc up, but it'll only last a short while- count on it. Also there's no wisdom in spending hours cleaning out $9 keyboards and $11 mice. I'd just remove the HD, rinse it in alchohol, blow it dry, and then bring it up as a slave on new PC to recover it's data. Then I'd bundle the rest of the Hurricane Katrina components onto eBay and let a teenager waste his hours trying to get a scum-covered PC to work - and take that money from the ebay flip and put it back towards the insurance recovery money.
Don't waste valuable time on cheap components.

Use isopropyl alcohol, this is the standard cleaner used on printed circuit boards and is safe on plastics, electronic components, semiconductor devices, fibre optics and does not leave a residue. In fact most manufacturers wash circuit boards to get rid of residues of flux.

If you can dismantle your computer, get a shallow tray filled with IP and dip and rinse the boards in it. Use a soft brush to get at debris and dry them thoroughly (usually half an hour is more than enough) and re-assemble.
Do not dip your hard disk though. Just clean the outside. If debris has got into your drive, even powering it up will damage the platters. If the data is important, send it to a data recovery shop.

Hope it's okay to post this:
Data Recovery Worldwide is doing recoveries for the uninsured
victims of Katrina at cost (25% of normal rate) and no charge at
all if unrecoverable.
Small discount for insured
www.DataRecoveryWorldwide.com
866-902-3799 (DRWW)
In any case, good luck!

Hi,

I am an owner of computer services company, and my 1st suggestion would be to make sure everything you are working on is completely dry. Do not use any solvents or WD 40 on it. Always remember to be unpluged, and if we are talking specifically about the CPU or harddrive area of the unit. You will probably be able to recover is the harddrive, ram, co-processor, motherboard, other cards. . . media, sound, etc
possibly the fan. Not the Power. . .forget it, and don't even try. . just get new power.

Do not place any items in drying units to dry. Such as the oven or microwave. The best thing to do is to let dry naturally. Check each unit seperately. Your harddrive, if correctly designed, should have been sealed, and you will be able to tell by just tilting it to see if there is any liquid that escapes from it.

The other items, ram and co-processor are small boards and the fan is usually partcially open and can be taken apart very easily, if you want to try and dry it manually.

Remember if you are going to attemtp to dry any items, do not use materials with small threads that will cause damage, or electrical friction. You can use the air can, which will help dry any of the items.

Good luck. . .

Bests, Alison Bolton
Westcoast Information Services
www.allyinfo.com

WD40 is conductive and it will shorten every thing! we have used "LPS No Flash" Electro contact Cleaner. As with all solvents , please test for compatibility on ABS or Acrylics. This product is less hazardous and contains no CFC or Chlorinated solvents.
Good luck.

Having been involved with water damaged computer electronics before (fire, flood and hurricane), I would make two suggestions and a recomendation:

Recomendation: Make sure everything is DRY DRY DRY prior to attemping any disassembly or recovery work. Do NOT trust any components which have been exposed to water for anything other than emergency recovery work - ie: do not reuse any components even though they may test out OK. I have seen water damaged parts work OK for a few weeks or months and then catastrophicly fail...

Suggestion 1: Mission critical infrastructure should be sent to a data recovery specialist. They have the techniques and equipment in place to recover most or all of the data on a failed HDD or array, including water damageed equipment. It ain't cheap, but they usually do a good drive. Make sure the data recovery company knows it's water damaged equipment...

Suggestion 2: For non mission critical systems, connecting a questionable HDD or storage system to a configured, bootable throw away system (ie: one where it doesn't matter if a component failure takes out the PS or mother board or...) and attempting to recover data from a secondary drive(s) is probably OK. Don't be too surprised if you can access data at first, but quickly see errors which soon make the media unreadable...

Materials needed:
5 to 10 gallons of distilled water
Dishwasher detergent
Dishwasher
Hair dryer
Paper towels or other lint free towels

Disassemble - Remove drives, mother board, PCI cards, power supply, etc.
Place items in dishwasher, drives and power supply in top rack.
Fill bottom of dishwasher with distilled water, usually to just below heating coil. Put in a small amount of detergent, just enough to act as a wetting agent. Run items through a wash cycle and stop the cycle when the washer drains. Refill the bottom of the washer with distilled water as before but DO NOT use detergent this time. Start another wash cycle and stop after the drain cycle. Remove the items and remove as much water as possible with the towels. Use the hair dryer on its lowest setting to blow dry the components - DO NOT overheat. The power supply will need the most attention and it may be safer to just replace it. Allow the components to air dry for 24 hours before re-assembly.
NOTE: Pure distilled water is not electrically conductive, but contaminates left behind can make the water conductive and the purity of the water can not be assumed. This process, using industrial washers and forced air drying, has been used for many years to reclaim and clean equipment.

Just dry out the PC. If there is to much debris, remove the harddrive and install it in another PC. This has worked for me after a flood. If you have a laptop, your best bet is to dry it out and hope for the best. The air vent on the hard drive is so small I don't think any water can get in. I have frozen some harddrives and gotten them to work enough to start up and remove the needed data. If the PC has been in water a while it's most likely not going to be usable even if you are able to start up and remove your data. And most important check the power supply and make sure there is no water or debris inside it. Good luck.

I thought those "holes" were a pressure equalization mechanism, and not something that air
can freely pass through.

Can someone please confirm this.

The best thing to do is to take it apart and let it dry fully...
I had a couple of hard drives get wet in a storage shed one time. I had to void the warranty and take the hard drive case off the top and let it hang and air dry. Took like a week to dry but the HD powered up and I was able to pull the data off.

WD40 is not WD40. The formula changed when solvent controls came into effect. It is now a water based emulsion that does leave an oily film that gels, gets sticky, and holds dust.

Circuit boards are cleaned in water after solder reflow in the factory. Water sensitive componants are hand soldered on after washing. Water sealed parts have the tapes removed or tabs broken off after cleaning. They are water sensitive after that. This is most componants that have enclosed batteries, socket mounts, or electrolytic capacitors.

Aluminum will corrode in fresh or salt water.

Alcohol is denatured with methanol and/or acetone. Both disolve many plastics and circuit protective coatings. Isopropal may have Epsom salts in it. Use electronics grade.

Circuit boards that have coin batteries or were running with a UPS are toast. Give up. New technology traces are only thousandths of an inch wide and can disappear or have an invisable break. Traces go under surface mounted componants and between chip legs and are not inspectable or cleanable.

Everyone is going to LCD for energy savings and screen stability. Truckloads of used 21" CRT monitors are available for under $100 each. Consider getting LCD for energy and desk space savings.

Disk drives have a HEPA filter on the side. Send off for data recover if the backups were also lost. Do not power up. Current drives have excellant crash protection coatings, but are still extemely contaminant sensitive and will fail almost immediatly if operated open outside of a "CLEAN ROOM".

If the computers are to be used in a business for business, buy new computers with no operating system or software. Find your licenses and put the software you own into new computers that will be better than the ones replaced. OS and software is worth more than the computer and lost down time. Reload your data from backups and get going. Time lost recovering is earnings lost. Unentered data is not being recorded and in danger, also. Spooky crashing systems will loose you man days of labor and effort which is real money. Look at each station and ask, "What would I loose if this machine disappeared?"

Br prepared to load systems from scratch. In some (most, what kind of luck do you expect if you are recovering from a flood?) cases, driver or XP license configuration will be incompatible with the new box and image restored systems will not boot. If the data is only available from a system image, restore to another drive and extract data. Most software loads hardware dependant libraries and has too many registry entrys to copy. Load software to the new system and let it adapt itself. Good luck reenabeling and transfering licenses. Keep your NIC cards. Some expensive software licenses key from the MAC address.

WD40, pressurized air, alcohol. Come on, lets be real. Keep it simple. Recover the hard drives and immediately contact a data recovery professional. I have used CBL Technologies in Armonk, NY with excellent success. Let the pros handle the data recovery. As for the rest of the computer, whether Mac or PC, consider it a loss. I cannot imgine what these individuals are going through. However, I would be more inclined to keep it simple and recover the most valuable part of the computer, the HD. This would allow the person to focus more on the tasks with a higher priority, like obtaining employment.

Many computer components (circuit boards and keyboards) can be washed in a solution of warm water with a few drops of dish detergent, then dried using (clean) compressed air or spin dried.

I used to work for a high-end audio manufacturer. We cleaned all of our circuit boards using a this solution to remove soldering flux. We washed the larger boards in a dishwasher (and small amount of dishwasher soap), and the small ones in a dish tub. We dried the large boards at low temp in an electric oven (regular kind used in your kitched), and the smaller boards in a salad spinner!

This works because electronic components (individual and integrated chips) are sealed units that withstand a reasonable amount of dowsing without any penetration.

I would just pull the hard drives and send them in for data recovery. Trying to rescue the machines will probably make the data unrecoverable. You can try to save the boards by cleaning them with FluxOff. We use Fluxoff quite extensivly and it does not hurt the electronics. If they are salvageable that is the only way to fly. I work in an Is Repair shop. Do Not Use WD40 because it is a conductor and you will burn the boards for sure as soon as you apply power.

I came across a site not long ago that gave instructions on how to remove the cover of a HDD, cut away a portion of the plate and replace it with smoked glass to give it a "cooler" look.
The article never said the drive would work later. But it did warn not to touch the surface.
I would think the most important aspect of recovery is the data. Smart businesses have that covered. The majority of home users may have a plan that includes "collect the floating CDs" for recovery onto your new system.
Although I have heard of WD40 many times, I never thought of running the parts through a dishwasher. Which one should be done first? Recovering your PC? Or cleaning out the doghouse your wife will send you to later?

If your information is that important to you, buy Forensics Suite by Digital Intelligence or EnCase forensics tools. Plug the hard drive into a clean box with Windows 98 on it. Use the tools to recover your information from the damaged hard drive. It is quite expensive, but if you want it that much, you will spend the money.

The only additional notes I would add that I used to make this successful was that while it was drying and after it dried, I used an electronics brush and compressed air to get out any residual. Key is making sure that all contacts are clean and all circuits are dry before you assemble and plug it in. I also turned it on before I put the hard drive in to make sure it would get to post. If they did, then I added the hard drive. If they didn't, the hard drive was still available to use in another computer.

Ok. I've read through the discussion thus far and noted that nobody seems to really know whether WD40 is conductive or not. Just thinking about it, I said not because one of it's hundreds of uses is to dry out automotive ignition systems. I decided to test it out. I filled a shallow bowl with WD40 and tried to get a resistance measurement. Even with the probes of a VOM sitting only a few hundredths of an inch apart in the pool of WD40, I got absolutely NO reading with the VOM set on the 20 Megohm scale. With results like that, I would not fear spraying any electronics with it, i.e., IT IS NOT CONDUCTIVE.

My test showed that WD40 itself is not conductive. Reading the can, you may get the idea that that is not the case due to the electrical warnings found thereon. The warnings are there to inform that the CAN is conductive and should be kept away from live circuits.

I've recoverd flood damaged PCs before and added a comment to an earlier post and looked through the rest to see if anyone really addressed the battery and power issue. For computers I could not recover, it was because of the CMOS battery corroded the board and caused damage. Some boards operated for a little while and others did not operate at all. The other side was if they were still plugged in when the flooding occured, the power on a couple shorted across and caused problems. I would look for corrosion before I started cleaning and if it looks like the board has been damaged too bad, you may want to pull drives, etc for possible salvage and toss the motherboard. System boards are getting better in cost and with the cost of current computers (299 - 599) your time may be worth more than the cost of the new computer. Then check the drive to make sure it's clean and try it.

Those who are seeking advice here probably are not qualified to perform the recovery of submerged PC's. I work with CNC Machine equipment and we deal with PC boards and servo motor drives/controllers costing upwards of $10,000 per unit. Some machines have four or five of the servo motor drives/controllers. Many of the modern CNC machines are PC based.

If a sensitive drive (Server) is involved, the most importiant thing is the data; send the hard drive to a facility for recovery and be done with it.

If no remote back up of data was in place or for those who simply wish to salvage components, then removal of visable contaminates by first a 'clean tap water' rinse may work for boards. Some type of light detergent or solvent should be used if oily residue or salt water is found. Then a deionized water rinse & dry after all visable contaminates have been removed.

The Hard Drive, Monitor, Power supply, floppy/CD/DVD drives, cooling fans, keyboards & mice should be carefully rinsed and dried as described above, replaced or sent to a professional. If the power was on when the unit was submerged/got wet then it may not work anyway.

Read several entries in these threads, as many have good ideas on how to recover various parts. Just remember any contaminate, oil or salt water, will need to be removed rinsed clean and dried completely before connecting the power.

Techman_