FWIW I had two desktop hdds (apparently) fail in that my pc was rendered unbootable with them (it wouldn't even post), and they made loud clicking noises.

However after I stuck them in usb enclosures they are completely accessible, including all ntfs and linux partitions, and no data was lost. Also, no clicking.

One was a Seagate and the other WD.

I still have them on tap, as backups of all the 'dispensible' stuff I couldn't be bothered to copy over to the replacement. TBH I think my motherboard could have been the culprit moreso than the actual drives. The most recent hdd has been running a bit longer than the other two did, without the issue manifesting so far.

I'm creeping myself out even typing this.  :-@

SpinRite is going really slowly. Been running a couple of hours now and only read about 16MB of 240GB. Gonna take a while. I wonder if it will help though.

Fucking /WONDERFUL/!!! :@ I spilled wine over my laptop's keyboard and screen! Luckily only a little bit got between the display and case. Washed the keyboard, gonna give it a bit of time to dry out before using it.

Have you removed the battery to be safe?

Came home to my biannual can' t boot grubs hosed and maybe so's the partition table. After the usual ministrations all came up good. Then I nearly drenched the keyboard attempting to pour an ice-choked can of IPA into an ill-judged glass. This ain't even Fri 13th. On the good side I subsequently beat the gangsters in the Dead Island supermarket & picked up an M16-alike for my troubles.

It does take a long time, that's the dynastat process trying to extract some sensible data from each sector, I had one drive take 14 hours, but I did get the data back though,

I tried but it kept slapping my hands away telling me it didn't want to be turned off.

At this rate its going to take a few of years. It's still only at 0.1%. Hopefully it'll get past a bad bit and speed up, we will see. I'll be amazed if it can recover something.

Yes I did take the battery out but no wine on anything critical. Left the keyboard to dry til now and when I plug it in the laptop powers on and off. Either it's still wet or it's broken.

SpinRite is taking AAAAAGES. I'm gonna try and image the drive instead. If I do do I need anothrr drive as big as this one or only as big as the used space on it?

Yes, looks like I do to try Dd_rescue.

The removing the battery is to ensure there's no power so nothing can short - should really do it ASAP. (i.e. quickly save any files then forcibly shut it down.

How are you drying it out? I'm sure it was here that I got the bowl of rice tip from - helps to absorb moisture. Though that's more for phones possibly... a laptop would need a large enough bowl/tray and enough rice.

It was only the keyboard I washed. Luckily it contained the wine and stopped it getting to anything underneath. I took it out and washed it under the tap.

Dried it on a paper towel over night and I've since put it on the radiator for a bit. Might try rice if it doesn't start working.

What sort of keyboard does it have that you can take it out without a liquid getting anywhere else? Is it one of those detachable transformer ones, or something else?

Also, can you try the machine without the keyboard attached, or does it fail with a press F1 error? :)

This one.

I have no way of booting without the keyboard attached because the power button is on the keyboard. I did, however, boot the laptop with another keyboard attached, remove the laptop keyboard and it worked.

And it was only q small amount of wine luckily.

Heh, well hopefully it's just still drying out.

Just tried it and managed to get Windows to boot. None of the keys worked.

Dd_rescue has so far imaged ~25% of the drive. 13MB from the start, 40GB after skipping the first 4GB and 20GB from the end.

It was taken ages trying to retrieve the bad bits but I can skip sections of the drive to find good bits. Fingers crossed I'll get some bits back at least.

55GB now. Not sure what to do with the image to recover boys yet.

First time I ran it it was copying the drive really quickly. It wasn't until the drive I was creating the image on ran out of space that I realised I was copying my SSD to my other HDD. Got mixed up with SDA and SDB.

LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL :'D

I'm not used to Linux :(

I think it's actually working :O Created an image skipping some bad areas. Might be some other good bits in between but surprisingly little was unrecoverable.

I booted into Windows, mounted the drive with... something, and currently using GetDataBack on it.