Norwegian Sea dip for Laptop!

During 2005 our labs received a phone call and subsequent email from a distressed Gentleman from Norway.
While enjoying the afternoon with his family on a Norwegian beach his laptop which was being used to backup photos from his digital camera accidentally fell into the Norwegian sea!

Suffice to say the client was extremely distressed to discover that the laptop would not boot up and displayed the message ‘No valid boot disk’. This error message created a great deal of gloom for the family because not only did the laptop contain that days photos but others from years previous.
Following an online search for data recovery services the client was eventually directed to our website where he duly contacted us for advice and help as to how to retrieve the precious data on the laptop hard drive.
During the conversation the client admitted to trying to gain access to the drive by connecting it to another computer system, this we informed the distraught client was not wise as water ingress would have probably occurred as it would have gained access to the disk enclosure and entered into the hard drive cavity and due to the properties of sea water there would be much specialist cleaning required, it was imperative that the drive not be switched on again and that it should be shipped to our labs a.s.a.p.
Following our safe receipt of the 2.5″ media our support staff phones the client to inform him that we have safe custody of the device and that an immediate free diagnosis of the media would begin.
The diagnosis involved examining the PCB or printed circuit board and the disk enclosure in our class 10 clean room environment.
It was clear from the beginning that minerals from the sea salt water had been deposited and that specialist cleaning would be required to take the recovery to the next stage.
Following the cleaning of the hard drive media the engineers attempted access to the user data area and with success! from this point the drive was handed over to the imaging team that created an exact clone of the media from the beginning to the end of the user data area.
Logical structure and file checking was next in the stages of recovery with specific attention paid to the .jpg or photo files that was required with engineers launching a random amount of data to check the integrity and usefulness of the file structure, all files that were required were recovered and moreover they were fully functional!
This was achieved with 48 hours of the labs receiving the 2.5 laptop hard drive media the drive was then returned to the client, his kind words of appreciation was typical of thankful computer users who have suffered data loss.
The real moral here is never try to attempt a data recovery to any media which has suffered from physical damage and as in this instance with water damage never switch the drive on, then contact professional data recovery labs for assistance.