HDD Problems after spilling tea on laptop

At lunch time today, my 13 month old caused some tea to splash onto my laptop keyboard.

As the tea made its way through the laptop, a blue screen with a big error message soon popped up.

I unplugged everything and have let the remaining tea drip out. Used a hair dryer to dry up any excess. Lifted up the keyboard and not much tea there.

Unfortunately there was a bit of tea coming through from the HDD enclosure when I pulled it out. I've tried turning on the laptop and it will not recognise the primary hard drive.

Does anyone think the data on the HDD is salvagable?

If you can connect it to another PC, you may be able to access any data that way.

I cant remeber whether the number of Pins on a notebook and a desktop HDD differ off hand. If not, slap it in your desktop as the slave and see if you can get to anything that way.

good news!

i let the HDD and PC dry out a bit more overnight and after putting everything back together this morning, the system has managed to reboot with all data on the HDD intact!

my only problem now is that my touchpad and pointer thing doesn't work anymore. tea must have gotten in between the contacts and needs a cleaning. will try a bit later but i'm scared to turn the laptop off now in case it doesn't boot up again! not a huge problem as i have an optical mouse attached.

In future always dry everything out completely for a few days before trying to turn it on, it's never a good idea to but electricity through anything that's wet.

My service manual for my Dell Latitude c840 advises to copy the user-specified parameters in NVRAM before I disconnect the palm rest (which needs to be fixed after my son spilt tea on the keyboard!).

How do I go about doing this?