water damage and data recovery

Wayne,

Here's my stock answer:

Whenever a liquid spill occurs the first thing that has to happen is the laptop should be shut down immediately. All power must be removed as soon as possible. It is especially important that the battery be disconnected and removed.

All affected parts must be removed from the laptop. No attempt should be made to start/restart the computer since this could potentially damage the logic board beyond all repair.

Then all affected parts would be washed in deionized water and blown dry with compressed air. (In a water spill the deionized water is probably not as critical. Depends on the mineral content of the water.).

This is especially true of the large chips on the logic board. Liquid can wick under them and cause havoc for weeks if not months after the incident.

The logic board should be placed in a drying/dehumidifing oven for at least two days. Longer depending on the spill.

The keyboard is a separate matter."

"Is there a way to remove the hard drive and power it up externally to recover the data?

PLEASE NOTE: DO NOT tell me to remove the drive and put it in an enclosure, that won't work for the 2014 MacBook Air!"

OK Wayne that's a mutually contradictory statement! What I''ll say is that given the current state of the technology the only sure way to do what you ask is to remove the PCIe based SSD and put it into a working identical MacBook Air.

However, given that you attempted to start the machine and the PCIe SSD is not a sealed unit, the chances that that SSD is dead are greatly increased.

If it is possible I'm sure OWC would know:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC

I'd call their tech support.

So....if you don't want to put the drive in an enclosure, how are you going to remove it and power it up?

With water damage, you MUST leave the machine to dry for a week or more before attempting to power it up.

How much water are we talking about?

~Lyssa

wayne cook wrote:

PLEASE NOTE: DO NOT tell me to remove the drive and put it in an enclosure, that won't work for the 2014 MacBook Air!

It WILL work if you find someone with the skills necessary to take the drive out of the old machine.

You don't have many other options other than waiting for the machine to dry out and praying that it will actually power on and work long enough to back up the data.

General File Recovery

If you stop using the drive it's possible to recover deleted files that have not been overwritten by using recovery software such as Data Rescue II, File Salvage or TechTool Pro. Each of the preceding come on bootable CDs to enable usage without risk of writing more data to the hard drive. Two free alternatives are Disk Drill and TestDisk. Look for them and demos at MacUpdate or CNET Downloads. Recovery software usually provide trial versions that enable you to determine if the software would help before actually paying for it. Beyond this or if the drive has completely failed, then you would need to send the drive to a recovery service which is very expensive.

The longer the hard drive remains in use and data are written to it, the greater the risk your deleted files will be overwritten.

Also visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on Data Recovery.

Most likely the directory is now corrupted from putting too many files on the drive and not paying attention to free space.

wayne cook wrote:

Is there a way to remove the hard drive and power it up externally to recover the data?

No.

Pete