A dental practice in Camberley knocked a jug of water across the reception laptop at the end of a Friday. It kept running, which everyone took as good news, and by Monday it was starting and then behaving strangely: keys repeating, the screen dropping out, the machine freezing on and off. Their IT contractor pulled the M.2 SSD and posted it rather than trusting the machine any further.
| Media | An M.2 SATA SSD removed from a laptop that had water spilt across it and was left running afterwards. It holds appointment records, correspondence and scanned referrals. |
| What was reported | Laptop at a dental reception, water spilt across the keyboard, machine kept running and then began freezing and behaving oddly, SSD removed by the practice's IT contractor and sent on its own, appointment records and correspondence needed. |
| Fault class | Liquid damage. Water had run down through the machine and reached the storage slot, leaving residue on the module's contacts and corrosion beginning on two of its pads. The memory and the controller were unaffected; what had failed was the connection between them and the world. |
| On the bench | Module examined under a stereo microscope with the corrosion mapped before anything was touched, cleaned in an ultrasonic bath and finished with isopropyl, contacts and affected pads reconditioned, the module powered under supervision behind a hardware write blocker and read on the bench, imaged in a single pass, the NTFS volume parsed in R-Studio, records validated by opening them and written to fresh media. |
Liquid does not stay where it lands. A keyboard is a grille over the working parts of a machine. Anything poured on it runs down and sideways, following the paths of least resistance, which on a laptop means the board, the connectors and any slot with an opening. The storage module is often the last thing anyone thinks about and one of the first things the water reaches.
Continuing to run was the expensive part. Water on its own is a nuisance. Water plus current is electrolysis, which strips metal from traces and pads at a rate measured in hours. A machine that stayed on all weekend is a machine that spent the weekend corroding itself, and the freezing on Monday was the result rather than a separate fault.
An SSD is not immune, but it fails at a different point. There are no platters to contaminate and no heads to bend. The vulnerable parts are the contacts, the exposed pads and the small components around them. Damage there stops the module being read while leaving every stored page exactly as it was.
Cleaning comes before power, always. Putting a module with residue on it into a reader means running current through a partial short and finishing off whatever the spill started. It is washed, dried and inspected first; only then is it powered, and even then under supervision on a bench rather than in somebody's machine.
The module was inspected under magnification before anything else, with the residue and the two corroded pads photographed and mapped. It was then cleaned ultrasonically and finished with isopropyl to lift what the bath had loosened, and dried thoroughly, because a module that looks clean and is not is a module that shorts on first power.
The affected pads were reconditioned enough to carry a reliable connection. The module was then powered under supervision behind a hardware write blocker, came up, identified itself correctly and read at full speed. It was imaged in a single pass, R-Studio parsed the NTFS volume out of the image, and a spread of appointment records and scanned referrals was opened to prove them before the set was written to fresh media.
Everything came back. The practice replaced the laptop rather than the storage, which was the right way round, since the machine was the part that had actually been ruined.
A single drive or SSD is £300 + VAT. Liquid damage sits outside the published guarantee along with the other physical categories, so 50% was payable upfront and the balance once the records had been confirmed.
Switch it off at once and do not switch it back on to see whether it survived. Hold the power button until it dies, unplug it, take the battery out if it comes out, and turn the machine upside down so the liquid runs back out rather than further in. Do not use a hairdryer or a radiator, because heat drives moisture deeper and lifts components off boards. Do not leave it running because it still seems to work: that is the situation in which the most damage is done, and it is done quietly. Get the storage out and treat it as the thing worth saving. If the spill was anything other than clean water, say so, because sugar and salt keep corroding long after the liquid has evaporated.
These files are written up from genuine enquiries taken from households and businesses in Bracknell, across Berkshire and Surrey and into London, with names, firms and anything else identifying stripped out. Each one sets down how the fault was reasoned through, the method it actually needed and the equipment it was worked on. One of them is a job that was turned away, which belongs here as much as the rest of them.
A drive that stops a computer starting is shorting the supply, and the platters behind it are usually untouched
A bent socket is a repairable joint, and unlabelled drives are read one at a time rather than guessed at
A drive taken out and replaced can still be read as a data device once it is out of the machine it was failing in
Examining it is free and takes 2 working days from arrival, the figure goes to you in writing and does not move afterwards, and a logical fault carries no fix, no fee. Start online or ring the freephone.