Wet laptop recovery

There is a old program called spinrite that keeps trying to boot an old drive after Windows would give up , 

There may be other free software that does the same thing.

Doesn't look that bad, I'd try to run it as-is. If the computer can't detect it at all, I'd try to rinse the board with a mix of isopropyl alcohol and distilled water (straight isopropyl alcohol can damage some plastics, this method gives you some safety margin).

I enjoyed the post; not your misfortune, but the technology discussed. On a side note: New Egg has over 200 re-conditioned laptops with Windows 7 Professional as the O.S.. I have purchased two of them sofar.......much better than W10. The machine is an HP Elitebook 8560p for $136 free ship and came with new battery.

Thanks for the tip, but these are used pretty extensively outdoors (they run our club's autocross T+S system).  I am 100% sold on the Dell ATG line for this use.  I can get refurbished machines for $200<$300 and they not only take a beating but they are very visible in bright light such as under the timing tent.  With 7 due to sunset permanently next year, I'll probably just bite the bullet and go the Win10 route.  The dead HP laptop was purchased with 8 and I took the free upgrade to 10, so I am (grudgingly) used to it.

On the original topic, many large thanks to RevRico for hooking me up with a SATA / IDE to USB convertor.  Unfortunately I have not had any success getting the volume to mount, so I suspect the drive may be toast.  The convertor seems to appear in the Devices panel as functioning normally, but there is no recognized drive attached to it.

Any suggestions?  If I don't get anywhere tonight I will probably take the drive somewhere local and see if they can mount / salvage anything.

Duke said:

Any suggestions?  If I don't get anywhere tonight I will probably take the drive somewhere local and see if they can mount / salvage anything.

If you can't see the drive or partitions at all (use diskmgmt.msc on Windows or fdisk/gparted on Linux to check), the only option left other than taking it to a professional data recovery shop is to rinse the drive's circuit board. You can't really make it worse if you're careful. If it was an older drive I might recommend the freezer trick, but on modern drives it often does more harm than good.