water intrusion

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Once I had to recover data from a harddisk drive that was submerged into water by accident. Water was gurgling inside the case. Never attempt to connect a drive in this state! To repair the drive I removed the metal top and used plenty of deionised water to rinse all the innards of the drive thoroughly. Afterwards I put the drive into a plastic bag, accompagnied with some bags of drying agent (silica gel) and left it for several days. Once the drive mechanism was dry I rotated the platters a bit to resolve stiction. After reassembling the case and connecting the drive to a computer it spun up and allowed to copy the complete contents to another drive. This harddisk was quite usable for a few week, still, until the water initiated corrosion caused fast growing defects.